This article has me emotionally torn. On the one hand, I'm a huge fan of competition between companies if it leads to innovation and benefits for the consumers, so deep down I want Apple to do well and make good decisions to counter Microsoft's grip on the market. On the other hand, ever since the first IPODS first came out (as cool as they were), Apple has always seemed super douchey and its users a mix of douchey and cultish. So seeing Apple stumble brings about a sense of smugness. Crazy as this sounds, and there might not be a follow through on this feeling, I feel kind of tempted to pay attention to Apple's and Microsoft's sales numbers on their high tier devices, just to see what happens. This all kind of makes me wish Commodore was still around.
I'm on the other side of this coin. I didn't think Apple was douchy, I just thought of them as a niche I wasn't in. All my life computers (DOS, Windows) were a little finicky, a bit plasticky, and covered in vents and screws and things. Then I bought the first iPhone, my first Apple product. It just always worked. So I abandoned my awful Toshiba laptop and bought a MacBook (late 2008 aluminum unibody). It was the first computer I actually liked. I started seeing Apple not as a niche and not douchy but as a brand for people willing to pay a bit more for something that was enjoyable to use. That MacBook was a solid performer for a full six years, and it struggled on for another 18 months before I finally replaced it earlier this year. It still works, but it's slow. I'd been looking at replacement Macs, but the prices just seemed insane. Considering I'd replaced the memory, hard drive and battery, a glued shut, mediocre spec MacBook didn't sit right. So I bought a used mid-2012 MacBook Pro on eBay. These are the last with user replaceable parts. I like it a lot. I'm still using my iPhone 5. I've been looking at replacements, and I keep hoping Apple will release a phone that makes me feel like those first Apple products did: enjoyable to use. But they aren't. And with prices going up and functionality going down, I think I'll drift myself away from the ecosystem. My next tech purchase might be a Surface tablet. If I like that, I'll get an Android phone. I liked Apple circa 2008 a lot. Apple circa 2016 isn't the same company, and brand loyalty is a bad quality for consumers.
There is some formula out there in the world, I am sure, that calculates the extra number of years of life I have earned, using Apple products as my primary computing device. OS updates just work. Applications are easy to install and remove. You can print easily. You can connect to any peripheral or online service easily. I've never had to deal with inexplicable total failures of the OS or the hardware. If I'd been using Windows for this long, I would have spent years - possibly decades - of my life deal with an ever-widening stream of Issues. But my Macs have always just worked. So yeah, maybe the inevitable "Apple has jumped the shark" complaints that have followed every single Apple announcement ever, well, maybe they are right this time. But I'll continue to do my work on my Macs until the day I can't. When that day comes, I'll probably switch to a pen and a smartphone, honestly. My life/time/mental health is too valuable to me to use MS products.
I've been using Windows and Mac concurrently ever since getting the 2007 aluminium iMac. Which is still, somehow, working fine albeit a bit slow. My current PC is one that I built myself back in 2011. I think the difference between operating systems is not as big as you think it is. Maybe it depends on how tech-savvy someone is or isn't, but Windows 7 has almost never caused me a lot of trouble. Not a spotless record but nothing that a bit of Googlefu couldnt fix. Hell, the only virus I ever got was incredibly lame malware on my Macbook Pro. I'll grant you that user experience design has been much better for much longer on OS X but even that advantage is slowly being eroded. (Case in point: iTunes.) In that respect I even think Android has surpassed iOS.
Know what's even worse than iTunes? Music in iOS. It constantly forgets what I was listening to. Queue up a couple albums, stop listening to music, then go back and find "Up Next" empty. I think it stores the queued music in active memory, so after a while the OS drops that. I went back to my iPod Classic, because at least that remembers what I was doing.Case in point: iTunes
Back at the birth of the web, I had three computers on my desk: a Sun UltraSPARC, a Mac, and a Windows box. I was doing testing of 3rd party Java and JavaVM implementations for JavaSoft (aka Sun Microsystems), and used all three machines heavily. When I moved overseas, eventually I had to replace my Mac and the closest Apple dealer was 3 countries away, and Apple was still charging 3x premiums for Macs overseas. So I switched to Windows at both home and work. Did that for 5 years or so, until I went back to the states and bought a 17" MacBook when it first came out. When I started this new job back in April, I started off on a Microsoft Surface with Windows somethingorother. The hardware was shit. The OS was shit. This company is an all-Microsoft shop (except the Executives, who are all on Macs, as is most of Marketing and about 1/3 of Product Development), so Microsoft Office, Microsoft OS, Active Directory, Outlook, the whole shebang. Every time I unplugged the Surface and plugged it back in, it would get confused about my monitors, and I'd have to constantly manually reset all my monitor settings. My MacBook Air connects to the exact same monitors, and works every single time. Often when the Surface would go to sleep, something weird would happen. It wouldn't wake. It would wake but never see my external monitors. It would wake and immediately crash. Or I would go to wake it up, and it would act like it had never been turned on before, and ask me to configure my language settings, etc. This was over 3 different Surfaces, so I finally asked for this old MacBook Air they had sitting in the corner, and I have been working on it fine ever since. Same work, same job, same software, different experience. I'm not saying you are wrong. This is just my personal experiences with some different OSes over the last 3 decades. (Then there was the other operating systems... BeBOX, Unix, Xenix, NeXT, PalmOS, WebTV, etc....)
Know how to run 3 monitors on a Mac Pro? Connect four monitors. Know how to run 2 monitors on a Mac Pro? Connect three monitors. Know how to get your 3-monitor rig to work with 3 monitors? Downgrade to Mountain Lion. Which - yeah. It's an 8-year-old computer. but it's an 8-year-old computer that's faster than the new Mac Pros.
I have only cursory experiences with the Surfaces. A friend of mine was convinced that it could replace and exceed his laptop's functionalities. He used it to put stuff on the TV while we were at his place with about as much grace and trouble as you had with your screens. I tried navigating the awful Metro UI that somehow thinks swiping in from the edge of the screen is a logical thing. All I learned from that experience was that I will not touch a Surface with a ten foot pole - let alone a freakin' stylus. My approach to technology is always that I want the best tool for the job. I don't really care about one manufacturer over the other as long as I get what I want out of it. Which is why in the last years I went for a desktop PC but a portable MBP Retina; an iPad tablet but an Android phone. There's benefits to staying within one ecosystem but the advantages of being platform-independent outweigh that for me.
So far so good with Windows 10 indeed. Had my outdated GPU driver that caused some problems but that's about it. I do know people whose devices got ruined because of installing Win10, but the common denominator is always that it was a crappy / old device in the first place.
I'm going to have to try a Pixel. The reviews seem glowing. Do you sync music to it? What do you use to keep track of your digital music?
I second Google Play Music. You can point it to a folder on your computer and it'll upload up to 20k songs that you can then stream or download to any device. For free. You can also add Spotify-like streaming for a monthly fee, which is what I did after a while.
Think it says 40k now. Mine's syncing at least 38k songs. But it has been since it was saying 20k. A couple of my friends have that whole spotify-like thing. I'll usually say "check out this band" and Google will have one or zero of their albums. People with esoteric tastes may be disappointed. I know for a fact that a lot of the time when it's streaming stuff at me, it's streaming my music at me because I recognize the errors in the files.
takes breath, licks lips So what I have is a catastrophe, but it works. Master device: Mac Mini 2014, which is an unadulterated chunk of shit Backup: Carbon Copy Cloner speaking to an 8-bay Synology DSM Sync A: Plex, also running on the Mac MIni, at least for now (might become an nVidia Shield) Sync B: Google Play Music Playback A: Google Play Music, which I don't pay for Playback B: Plex, which allows local download to Android and iOS It has the advantage of giving a couple pathways to success. It has the disadvantage of requiring a closetful of tech. Google will tell you that if you sync to Play Music, you can restore from it like a backup. THEY'RE LYING. I had to do that and it failed out of about 60% of my music. The Synology allows you to back up to Crashplan or Amazon, and I do. And I could probably cook off iTunes at this point and just go Plex but the Plex music interface isn't quite there yet. Maybe another year or so.
There were legitimate reasons to pay the Apple Tax at the time. One of the primary ones is that USB is an asynchronous protocol while Firewire was a synchronous protocol, so that a USB audio interface necessarily had more latency than a Firewire one (to give time to buffer the packets arriving out of order). That was solved with USB2, though. Color control was at system level within Apple (or was easier to get to, anyway) while Microsoft was always tricky to manage. If you purchased your peripherals within the Apple ecosystem you had a higher chance of things going together, whereas if you braved the wilds of Windows you were likely to lose days or weeks getting all your components working well together. Nowadays Windows is likely to throw up four or five nag windows about whatever you have plugged in, and it may push an update that borks you hard, but the big outfits have a M$ backend anyway because all the IT guys have long since thrown up their hands at Apple. Yeah, you can print with Apple and yeah, you can log onto the web with Apple but most of the big plants are either Unix or M$ in racks. Apple still has an absolutely insane market cap. They're also like 1/3rd of all smartphones in the United States. I forget what mind-boggling amount of revenue they make on the fuckin' App Store every month but it's not like they're "stumbling." It's that the creative professionals that kept their market share during the dark times have not only been left out in the cold, they've been kicked in the nuts and pissed on in passing. I've still got four Apple computers in my tender care. I'm typing on one right now. But seriously. Fuck apple.