[jaems33]

I hate to say it, but I agree.

The commercials aren't the only red flag for me.

The recent releases (MacBook Pro Retina, Mountain Lion, rumored iPhone 5, iOS6) haven't thrilled me at all and I have been looking forward to the MBPR and iPhone5 for a long time.

[achompas]

> The recent releases (MacBook Pro Retina, Mountain Lion, rumored iPhone 5, iOS6) haven't thrilled me at all and I have been looking forward to the MBPR and iPhone5 for a long time.

All of these have been released so recently (less than a year since Jobs passed away) that it's likely he played a large part in their design. Further, you're talking about (1) a 15" laptop that beats almost everything else on the market, (2) a minor version bump of OS X, and (3 & 4) two products that haven't been released yet.

I'm as interested in Apple, post-Jobs as everyone else, but the arguments I've seen so far look too forced. The true test will occur over the next 2-3 years--not just the last 9 months.

EDIT: I like snowwrestler's point: this is all "hindsight bias."

EDIT 2: I've fallen into this trap myself at some points, especially with some of these commercials. But these are just single data points. We shouldn't fall into the trap of overemphasizing single data points.

[kokey]

I think the next big product or two (iPhone 5, or the 'other thing' that is possibly a TV) is what will prove whether Apple will stay strongly in the running or fade away as quickly as it did when Jobs was pushed out of the company. I personally think it'll be good for a while longer than that, but the company will need to find new leadership focus after that.

[taligent]

Exactly. This is what makes this all so hilarious.

Steve Jobs said himself that he was directly involved in the next 2-3 years worth of upcoming products. So "this would never have happened under Steve Jobs" can partly be blamed on him.

[radley]

Steve wasn't just the inspiration. He was also the guy who was more than willing to say "WTF is this? We can't release THAT! Fix IT!!"

Without that you've got the contentment of the collective.

[achompas]

Sure, but we've also got anecdotes where he'd curmudgeonly agree with the collective after lots of pushback from them.

I'm of the opinion that people assign too much importance to Jobs' final decisions. He created a design-oriented culture at Apple and guided Apple to the Dieter Rams style. But do we really think that, after >10 years working together, Jony Ive would approve of something that Jobs would hate? Does anyone doubt Ive's design decisions at this point?

[DeepDuh]

Ive doesn't sign off on Software. When you look at the MBP as an example, the hardware is great, the release software was buggy (most of it fixed with ML though).

[jasonlotito]

> "WTF is this? We can't release THAT! Fix IT!!"

But he was also the guy that missed in that regard multiple times as well. Sure, he might have stopped a lot from going wrong, but the stuff he didn't say "No" to quickly became a blight on the company.

[mikecane]

>>>but the stuff he didn't say "No" to quickly became a blight on the company.

Ping.

[josephlord]

Never used it and it seems to have completely failed in the market but I don't see the harm it has done the company.

Anyone got any better examples? FCP seems closer to a possibility that could have been avoided just by keeping the existing product on the price list in parallel for those that really do require it's features until the new version is fully fleshed out.

[astrodust]

Given the evidence in the new Samsung court case, with the 2010 iPad being worked on in 2002. That means there's still at least another eight years of pipeline that's yet to hit the public.

[CamperBob2]

Of course, Jobs would have spent the year before he died blasted out of his mind on very strong medications and analgesics.

[Florin_Andrei]

Sure, but towards the end he was pretty sick, so I would assume quite a few bloopers may have escaped his attention.

[masklinn]

That sounds like a decision looking for a justification. You weren't supposed to be thrilled by ML just as you weren't supposed to be thrilled by SL. Were you thrilled by Lion? I was not, I still consider it a huge pile of shit. Hell, I'm way more thrilled about ML because SceneKit, that may make me put my trusty SL to rest, it's got way more potential than fucking skeumorphic iCal or "linen all the things" (which I see in the line of the old stripes, that's going to age just as nicely and in 5 years everybody will agree it was a moronic idea).

MBPR, if you were looking forward to it I fail to see why you wouldn't be thrilled by it, it's the biggest (positive) change in Apple's laptops since the 2nd gen Air.

As for iOS 6, how is it any more underwhelming than iOS 5? Remember when you were thrilled about the "deep twitter integration"? Or that Apple had finally added a notification system which didn't blow goats? Yeah me neither.

As to the ads... all the Siri ads I've seen so far make me facepalm.

[wonderyak]

Just because I think it needs to be said - I, for one, was thrilled with Snow Leopard. I think it is the best OSX version by far and away.

[danudey]

Agreed. Snow Leopard was a great product, and it was worth every penny. Lion had a lot of new features and groundwork that made it worth the upgrade as well. Now, though, the trend seems to be 'incremental improvements and a few new features', and I'm ok with that.

[masklinn]

Oh I do think it's the best OSX version yet, I just wasn't thrilled when they announced. There was little thrilling about it (aside from the new bugs of 10.6.0, and the dropping of PPC). The most major "features" (to me) were Finder, Time Machine and Spotlight sucking significantly less, that Quicktime X existed, and the 64b kernel.

[mhenr18]

Snow Leopard's not that great.

Lion (and now Mountain Lion) runs faster on my mid-2010 baseline MBP than SL ever did.

Snow Leopard's UI was way too colourful and the Aqua scrollbars were far too big and look really dated.

It wasted pixels on scrollbars and that stupid resize widget (thank fuck Apple finally stole something useful out of Windows) which made your windows look really tacky.

Natural scrolling feels a lot nicer than the old-style scrolling, even on my old school mouse with a clicking scroll wheel.

Quick Look doesn't suck (in both UI and functionality - persistent QL is amazing).

You're limited to OpenGL 2.1 (you won't see games for SL now that GL 3.2 goes back to the previous version of OSX. GL 2.1 can go and die and that's a sentiment a lot of developers share).

The entire system's a lot more subtle in appearance and IMO it's visually a lot cleaner.

Don't be surprised by people appreciating the Lion features a lot more now that Mountain Lion's out and devs can finally drop support for SL.

[pja]

Oo. If we're going to UI nitpick, then I'll just add that having updated to Mountain Lion straight from Snow leopard, the new low contrast UI widgets are driving me up the wall.

I just can't tell whether a UI element is active or not because everything is "pale grey" or "slightly darker grey". UI designers everywhere must be having fits.

The glacial Spaces transitions when you use ctrl^<- or ctrl^-> are excruciating but will hopefully be fixed at some point: I think that's just an oversight.

[gurkendoktor]

> I think that's just an oversight.

...that has been ignored for a year and counting. :(

[Caballera]

I just watched the new Apple ads and think they are fun. I don't feel they were directed at me. But I do feel for non-Apple and non-tech people they could raise the question, who are these Geniuses and perhaps they'll look deeper into it and visit a Apple Store.

[grecy]

> The MacBook Pro Retina haven't thrilled me at all and I have been looking forward to the MBPR for a long time.

Wow, you have some high expectations.

What exactly were you looking for?

[radley]

The RMBP is fine as long as your focus is text, so it's great for programmers & business people.

But Mac has been the mainstay of graphic designers who predominantly use Creative Suite, and the RMBP is quite useless without a 2nd, non-retina monitor.

[jsz0]

There is no external video connection available to push the bandwidth required for external Retina displays yet. You could do a 15-17" external Retina display but 24-27" would require 2-3 ThunderBolt connections plus a GPU that is not even technically feasible to put inside of a laptop right now. It's OK to be disappointed but I think it's also good to be grounded in reality too. You're looking for a feature that is basically technically impossible on a MacBook Pro at this time. I wouldn't even expect to see it on a Mac Pro until late next year pending the next major revision to ThunderBolt that could move this much bandwidth over a single connector. Depending on GPU roadmaps, which I'm not terribly familiar with, it could be several more years before mobile GPUs can handle that load. It may be that a Retina ThunderBolt Display will include it's own GPUs for this instead.

[radley]

I'm not concerned about using a retina Cinema Display.

What you may not understand since you probably don't use Creative Suite is the 1x pixel problem. The RMBP doesn't account for that.

The most obvious problem is vector drawing - the retina monitor automatically scales and anti-aliases vector lines so there's no precision or accuracy.

You can do large detailed bitmap images on the retina pretty well, but you can't do small pixel-accurate work that you need for websites & applications.

It's a big deal, which is why Apple & Adobe were so vague on the release.

[grecy]

I personally think this is why they're holding out on new Mac Pros until late 2013. They'll have Retina external displays, and enough hardware to drive them.

[drumdance]

This is exactly why I decided to get a new iMac instead of a Macbook Pro. As a programmer I knew that I would spend most of my time looking at an external monitor, so the display was not as important. I could get something with a lot more power for about $700 less. I figure I'll wait until retina makes it on the Air and get that as my secondary computer. Previously my Macbook Pro played both roles.

[grecy]

> nd the RMBP is quite useless without a 2nd, non-retina monitor.

And how would you have a laptop manufacturer who designs a super-high res display to get around this problem?

[radley]

Probably by not starting a war with your core partner?

Apple had time to get Apple apps like FCP & Aperture up to spec - they could have prepared Adobe similarly. FWIW, I'll admit it may not have mattered. Adobe is slowest moving ship that's still relevant.

But "Photoshop will be ready soon" and no delivery date show Apple and Adobe to be out of touch their old base.

[stan_rogers]

Perhaps, though, this is the kind of kick Adobe needs. Photoshop, for instance, was built on Carbon until CS5, and needed some tricksy memory tampering to keep the whole session from being a swap exercise. (Even on Windows, I've found that if I didn't already know what the dialog contents were, I'd never figure them out half of the time -- the text doesn't fit into the space they've allotted for it, even for single-line legends.)

The features and ecosystem keep me there, but their underpinnings have lagged, and apart from the splash screen (which is now "creative" but butt-ugly), they haven't spent a whole lot of time making sure the GUI works on any machine, let alone on Retina-type displays.

Being able to judge adjustments for print at near-print-size has always been a major hole in the feature set. That's not Adobe's fault—until very recently, there were only a handful of automobile-expensive monitors requiring special interface hardware that could provide such a function—but they should have realized that if the subject ever came up, designers, ADs and photogs would be all over it in a flash. That doesn't take a JREF challenge winner to predict—the phone-sized hi-rez monitor should have been a clue that it was just around the corner. It should have already been in the pipes, even if it wasn't ready for prime time for the launch of CS6.

[radley]

There's little chance this kick Adobe into action. They're moving slower and slower (and subscriptions are a license to snooze). It makes me very worried it will be 3-4 years before CS is in line with retina (instead of 1-2).

FWIW - I don't see how retina can be solved easily: Apple kinda screwed it. Mainly, how do you show 1x pixel accurate content on a device that won't do 1x pixels?

[grecy]

So you're complaining that the rMBP doesn't thrill you because Adobe's software has not been upgraded to take advantage of the retina display yet?

You must think the Tesla is non-thrilling because there are not yet ubiquitous charging stations.

You must think 4G handsets are non-thrilling because there is not yet enough 4G coverage.

You must think Thunderbolt is non-thrilling because there are not yet enough devices that support it.

To summarize, you think something is not "thrilling" because the world at large is not ready for it yet. This "keep doing what we've always done" approach really bugs me, and is not a good way to think if you have any interest in progressing and actually making anything better.

[beedogs]

These are the kinds of comments I downvote. You come off as a petulant child.

FWIW, Thunderbolt is crap, precisely because it's been almost two years and there's still not a fucking thing to plug into it.

[tesseractive]

Considering that there's a pretty good chance that you'll need a 1x monitor to accurately preview pixel-accurate work like web graphics even after Adobe offers full support, I'm not sure that your rant laying the entire problem at Adobe's door is addressing the actual problem.

[radley]

"Thrilling"? You've misread me again.

[davepeck]

In the near-term, as you point out, Photoshop is useless on a Retina display (unless you're driving it at full @1x resolution.) I'm glad I've got my trusty old Samsung 213T at home.

Even _when_ Adobe gets around to adding Retina support in CS6, it's clear we'll still need access to @1x monitors to ensure that we're shipping the pixels we think we're shipping.

In the long-term, it's hard to predict the adoption curve for high DPI displays. Especially where the web is concerned, I'm convinced that designers and developers will need to support and test for @1x displays for many years to come -- perhaps a decade or more?

[roc]

Just like any nice laptop display was useless for many years without a second, crappy CRT monitor...

[ChrisLTD]

Professional designers should be able to easily justify the expense of a non-retina external monitor. You can get a 24 inch standard LCD monitor for less than $200 these days.

[forgottenpaswrd]

Professional designers use $200 monitor?

That is news for me.

I will have to ask them, last time I asked (six months ago) they told me that professional monitors with professional color profile methods are worth every cent or penny you pay for it, and that $200 monitors are shit in this respect.

[jonknee]

Use your fancy Retina display for the colors and the cheapo for "pixel perfect" if you're having a hard time doing it on the fancy screen.

[radley]

Uhm - I said 2nd monitor. And no graphic designer will use a $200 monitor. Might as well go PC. (You can get an awesome 24" Cinema Displays on CL for < $500).

My point was that you lose portability when you must be tethered to a monitor that works.

[Xcelerate]

What are you talking about? Plenty of graphic designers will use a $200 monitor (especially a Korean IPS). Some even use TN panels so they can design an image in the way that it will be perceived by most consumers.

[davidjohnstone]

I don't know why a professional graphics person would use a monitor with no controls except for brightness (other than "to see what consumers see"). Having control of the contrast and colour levels is vital for calibrating a monitor, which is something that everybody with a professional interest in visuals should do.

[timc3]

They may use it, but perhaps shouldn't, unless it was one if the smallest IPS screens and even then something like photoshop is really annoying.

Korean IPS are cheap for a reason, such as non uniformity of color across the display.

[huhtenberg]

It's not even that.

Now that Jobs's gone turning iPad sideways with the taskbar open causes app icons to overlap. Sometimes, not always, but that's just the kind of "sloppy" that just didn't exist in Apple products a year ago. They are slipping. I will give them a couple of years tops before they are back at the average product polish levels.

[kalleboo]

iOS has been super buggy ever since iOS 5. Has nothing to do with Jobs' death.

[DeepDuh]

IMO super buggy is an overstatement. Which bugs seriously affect you?

[kalleboo]

Just lots of small things. Keyboards that stick around. The backlight randomly sticking at full on or full off. Settings panels that crash (got better in the latest update) or don't refresh. Alarms that don't go off. Everything related to the App Store. Internet sharing drops randomly. iCloud has been a disaster since day one. iMessages that arrive twice.

[DeepDuh]

Oh right, I forgot about the alarm one. That has actually bit me. iMessages and iCloud I don't even use, don't really need it.

You're right there are a few things that should have been caught in QA.

[rdl]

Especially compared to Blackberry, iOS has never had a good alarm system. Kind of a shame, as that would be a fairly tractable feature for a single employee to own. Third party alarm apps have obvious problems, too.

[taligent]

Always fascinating watching this kind of delusion in action.

This complete rewriting of history so that every Apple product before Jobs death had some extraordinary level of perfection that somehow doesn't exist anymore. When in actual fact the quicker release cycles for Apple software is resulting in less bugs.

[huhtenberg]

Oh, it's irrational alright. No arguing there. However, while there might be now fewer bugs, there count of imperfections that lie on the surface and contribute to the spoiled first impression is on the climb.

[jonursenbach]

Keep in mind that the products you mentioned have been in development long before Jobs passed away, so his passing shouldn't have had any effect on them.

Wait a few years when Jobs' product roadmap runs out and we'll see what they're doing and if it's still up to snuff.

[aggie]

Jobs was visionary, not clairvoyant. I'm sure he did everything he could to keep Apple on his track as long as possible, but there's only so much that can be planned years in advance.

I imagine Tim Cook was groomed as a Jobs zombie of sorts. He's an manufacturing/operations guy, not a creative product manager. Eventually Jobs' roadmap will run its course and Tim Cook will be replaced or exposed as an automaton. It seems to be showing already.

[hyperbovine]

Jon Ive?

[Macha]

The rMBP was the first Mac that I would seriously consider buying for myself. I haven't, because I can't afford to buy a new laptop just because a shiny new one came out, but if I had been looking for a laptop at that time, I would have bought it. A couple of my non-Apple using tech friends had the same opinion.

Then again, I'm not exactly Apple's core customer base, as I have no love for OS X and would probably have just installed Windows (for gaming) and Linux on it, but it's the first time in years where their computer hardware has distinguished itself, rather than selling on the basis of the OS.

[ruswick]

I agree that there isn't much that Apple has done lately that has been truly groundbreaking. The last time that I was really surprised by Apple was the iPhone 4. That said, it's totally unreasonable to assert that Apple is declining because Steve is gone simply because their products haven't "thrilled" you or because they ran a bad line of ads.

The Retina MBP is an excellent machine with one of the best screens to ever be put on a consumer-grade device. It might not blow everyone's mind, but it is at least as interesting of a product as the scores of laptops that were put out under Steve.

Mountain Lion isn't groundbreaking by design. It's an iteration on Lion, and so it's unreasonable to expect a massive amount of new features. The iPhone 5 and iOS6 haven't been released yet and in the case of the former the rumors are so vague and unsubstantiated that it's categorically ludicrous for you to pass judgement yet.

Lastly, I have to ask why the amount of "thrill" that a product brings matters anyway. Most consumers don't want to be thrilled. They want to buy a computer, and that's it. Apple is successful not because they thrill people, but because they make good products. The Retina MBP and Mountain Lion are still good products.

I think the biggest annoyance in the post-Jobs era is that every imperfect action that Apple does is automatically passed off as a result of Steve being gone. Steve wasn't perfect, either. We need only look to the iTunes phone, Ping or the button-less iPod Shuffle. Apple has never been perfect, and the post-Jobs era is no different.

[slovette]

"I have to ask why the amount of "thrill" that a product brings matters anyway."

Marketing. Hype and thrill, I would argue, is a direct result of Apple's financial position today. The everyday consumer doesn't understand the technical qualifications nor do they care. They want nice, shiny and new. Start with that and build a stable high-quality product to match and it could be candy canes you're selling, you're gonna be successful. Packaging is probably the most important part of a product. It entices thrill and envy, the very primitive emotion that makes you click the usually brightest button on the page: "Buy".

[rdl]

While this may be against NDA, iOS 6 Beta is actually quite nice. If they can get real buy in from non-Apple iOS developers for iCloud, it will be a big win, but IMO it all comes down to iCloud (and probably the long term premium for the Apple ecosystem depends primarily on iCloud).

The security features in ML were critically necessary to keep OSX viable for business and professional use. 10.7 is vastly less secure than a well managed corporate Win 7 machine, and maybe even worse out of the box. (Linux probably covers the whole range of less or more secure based on exact distribution and features, but isn't terribly relevant for desktops). Which made the Google no-windows policy from a few years ago pretty funny. ML is now at parity with Win 7 out of the box, but still probably weaker in an enterprise setting due to lack of management tools.

[brown9-2]

Seems unfair to judge Apple based on rumored specs for the "iPhone 5".

[FreshCode]

It feels like someone inside Cupertino has been saying, "OK, it looks good!" more than they have been saying "No."

[rimantas]

If I ask you what would they need to have to thrill you, would you be able to answer? Built in toaster? Cure for cancer? We don't expect luxury cars to thrill us, why do we need that from electronics? It's a sign of maturity and I will take solid no-thrills product over gimmicky one any day.

[pizza]

The trend could just be a fluke. Only time will tell...

[aprendo]

The rMBP, widely hailed as the best Mac since forever? You seem to be the only person on the planet disappointed by it (besides people disappointed in the glued-in battery – but that’s nothing new).

Besides, there are a few years to go until we run out of Steve Jobs products.

(I think this whole discussion is utterly pointless at this point. Look at Apple’s stock in ten years and you will know the impact of Jobs. I have my doubts that it will be possible to say much meaningful now.)

[Retric]

I hate the rMBP. Apple calls it an 'PRO' laptop but it's basically just an 'AIR' with a higher resolution display. It's got no optical drive so you can't swap in an extra HDD while keeping the SSD for the OS / programs. It's limited to 8 or 16GB of ram and you can't upgrade it after the fact. It's also got way to few connectors no HDMI/DVI or even VGA. At the same time they also killed of the old MB line entirely.

[jsz0]

Trolling or joking? The previous generation MacBook Pros didn't have HDMI/DVI/VGA either. Not for several years at least. The rMBP does have HDMI too BTW. Of course they have the refreshed model of the MBP that includes expandable memory and optical drive. I vote for trolling but you got me so well played sir.

[Retric]

Meh, more just an off the cuff rant, which is why I messed up the HDMI issue. I was looking into getting a MB for a while, what I liked about the MB was the 500GB disk space + 1000$ price point. I also miss the 17" MB pro for different reasons, but it really seemed to me they where sacrificing a lot for an interesting display idea and then killing off some of there models to make it look like a better option than it is.

[jsz0]

Fair enough. Apple is often ahead of the market on these things and leaves some people behind at least temporarily.

[jpxxx]

You prefer the presence of an optical drive so you can tear it out and then put in a mechanical HDD? The product you want is called a MacBook Pro and it is currently for sale in any configuration your heart desires.

While we're on it, the rMBP has a native HDMI port and a variety of inexpensive adapters that will keep your VGA workflows going.

And while we're hammering it into paste, please name one feature on the now discontinued MacBook line that you miss.

[gergles]

> and it is currently for sale in any configuration your heart desires.

... except for the one with a retina display and room for a mechanical HDD in addition to the SSD, which is what the OP was complaining about?

Seriously dude, read the post you're replying to first.

[jpxxx]

Oh don't 'dude' me over his sloppy grab bag of complaints. A pretty good case could be made that Apple's bifurcation of the MacBook Pro line was unnecessary - while they clearly can't manufacture Retina displays in adequate volume and a default SSD would slay margins, it could have been done. They could have kept the same 0.91" chassis and given everyone all the HDD/optical/port goodies they wanted...

...except with significantly worse battery life trying to keep up with the insane thermal load of a panel demanding next-level GPU performance. Then everyone would be disappointed, instead of just one guy on HN.

In two years, virtually everything on the market is going to be "basically just an AIR with a higher resolution display". Get cozy with the idea.

[omgsean]

On the old white MacBooks I personally liked the yellowing underneath where my wrists sat. It said to the world "hey, this guy is spending WAY too much time online and may have some hygiene issues he needs to work out."

[jpxxx]

Guh, those were some of the absolute shittiest portables Apple ever put out. Even after the discoloring plasticizers were worked out, almost every single one of them saw the topcase flake and crack in normal use. Performance was poor out of the box, the screens were garbage, and the bottom looked bad after only moderate use.

[GrumpySimon]

If you "hate" an inanimate chunk of aluminium, glass, and various other metals, you probably need to get out more. You may be disappointed by it, or less than thrilled by it, or even think that it's nothing special. But to hate it... that's a bit extreme.

[aprendo]

It has HDMI (as well as not one but two ports that can be used as VGA ports with a simple adapter, but that’s all very much besides the point) – and I’m not sure what you were expecting?

The rMBP is the perfect embodiment of Apple’s laptop philosophy. Apple’s Steve Jobs (maybe even Steve Jobs himself, I’m not sure) pretty clearly said years ago that all laptops will be like the Airs in the future. All flash memory. No optical drive. Thinner and lighter at the expense of upgradeability. This is how they saw the future, this is what they made happen with the rMBP.

I can’t help but think that if anything, Steve Jobs would have pushed the rMBP much more aggressively (but, really, I’m just speculating here).

[Gigablah]

I cancelled my rMBP order when I tried it out in the store and saw the screen lag in Safari for myself.

[kalleboo]

Was that on Mountain Lion?

[aprendo]

Scrolling is buttery-smooth on most websites, less so as complexity ramps up. (Some particularly complex Facebook pages, for example, have minor stutters, i.e. dropped animation frames.) Still, it’s minor stutters even on those.

That’s with Mountain Lion. Lion was markedly different.

[yuhong]

Fortunately Mountain Lion was announced at the same time as the rMBP, and it was announced even back then that rMBP owners will get Mountain Lion for free.