| ▲ | tptacek 10 hours ago |
| I couldn't disagree more. Some of the worst Apple computers I've owned date to the Jobs era. All of the best have been from the Cook era. Apple Silicon has been an enormous success. (My first Apple was a TiBook, for what it's worth.) |
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| ▲ | musicale 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The TiBook was a milestone product and a great Jony Ive-led design. Apple has been making silver, thin, metal laptops ever since. Even a titanium iPhone for some reason. The last Titanium model with 1GHz, 1GB RAM, gigabit Ethernet, DVI, Firewire, DVD/CD-RW, 64MB Radeon 9000, etc. seems pretty great and could run both Mac OS 9 and OS X. And that glowing Apple logo on the back of the display (which I miss in modern Mac laptops.) The main defects (apparently fixed in later models) seem to be the weak hinge and display cables. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G4 |
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| ▲ | tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I didn't say the TiBook was one of the worst Apple computers I've owned. But my 16" M3Max is so much better than it. And the construction of the modern Macbooks is not all that similar to that of the TiBook. | | |
| ▲ | musicale 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | What a difference 20 years makes, I suppose. Apple laptops do seem to have solid hinges now. ;-) Apple Silicon definitely transformed expectations for laptop performance and battery life, especially in a fanless design like the MacBook Air. I do wish my M1 MacBook Pro weren't bulkier and heavier than my old intel model. I went all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt so I would have liked 4 ports (or more). But the battery life and performance are probably worth it. And the MacBook Air 15" is lighter and thinner than the 15" intel models, but still has good battery life. |
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| ▲ | lbourdages 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well, the current hardware is solid - great build quality, powerful, insane battery life. However, software-wise, the peak was 10.6. There hasn't been the same level of quality ever since. |
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| ▲ | xtracto 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's simply amazing. I was looking for a ~$6000 USD 14in laptop with good specs. NOTHING compares to what Apple has right now. I looked at Framework, some gaming laptops, ThinkPads, Dells and most of them would require 16+ inches to get specs similar to a MBP 14 Ultra with 128GB unified ram and 8tb disk. ... Apple has done an amazing job integrating all that hardware. And I say this as someone who was looking to buy a notebook to install Linux, as its my favorite OS. So what im doing is put Ubuntu Server Arm + kde-desktop in VMware and use it as my main dev env. | |
| ▲ | tptacek 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I would not want to be running Snow Leopard. And remember, that's a release they had to do because 10.5 was so rough! | | |
| ▲ | majormajor 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why not? Other than "because they're old"? Tiger and Snow Leopard in particular were very solid releases. Heck, the aluminum Macbooks from that era are still the foundation of Apple's laptop design. And they didn't have the butterfly keyboard fiasco! But this is a bit of a irrelevant distraction. Apple under Jobs wasn't loved for quality of hardware, it was loved for telling a better story of progress of personal computing. From the iMac "make it simpler by going back to basics, but future-looking basics" to "easier to manage, funner to use music players" through showing how smartphones and then tablets could be far more functional and usable than MS', Palm's, or Nokia's visions. The watch is the next best category-definer since then, and the iCloud cross-device stuff generally feels better-done than competitors still, but otherwise... refine, refine, refine, and slowly add more ads and upsells. Microsoft or anyone else could run that playbook, in a way that they never could match the Apple playbook from 1997 to 2011. (One side question here is "are there new segments out there waiting to be invented?" which I don't know the answer to. But even so, "becoming just another upsell-pushing, ad-driven, software-subscription-service provider" wasn't a necessary path.) | | |
| ▲ | snowwrestler 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Snow Leopard eventually became a solid release. At launch it had many bugs, including some that lost customer data. It’s tempting to compare one’s memory of an old late-cycle OS, after all the UI changes have been accepted and the bugs squashed, to the day-1 release of a new OS today, when UI changes seem new and weird and there are tons of bugs they knowingly shipped to hit the launch date (just like with Snow Leopard). But it’s not really a fair comparison. |
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| ▲ | Gigachad 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | iOS and ipadOS have gotten massively better over the years. The gap between them and macos has been slowly closing. Still a lot to go, but so much has improved. | |
| ▲ | cortesoft 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Peak was System 7! | | |
| ▲ | musicale 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Apple's classic Mac GUIs were beautiful and discoverable, with clear, visible controls/affordances. Running Apple's "Macintosh" screen saver reminds me that Apple used to care about every pixel. Now even basic user interface elements like the menu bar are clunky, with things like the Window menu not aligning properly (even on a wide display where there is more than enough space.) Menus getting lost behind the notch is another annoying problem. It seems like Microsoft learned from Apple's original approach somewhat, at least for Windows 95 through Windows 7 (though I think for a while there was a dead zone below the start menu, a fairly obvious mistake), but Apple seems to have strayed from the path with an invisible, gestural interface. | |
| ▲ | linguae 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From a UI standpoint, I agree. There’s nothing like the classic Mac interface and its associated Apple Human Interface Guidelines for GUI software. I love Jobs-era Mac OS X, but the classic Mac and its ecosystem of applications were something special. However, when it comes to UX, stability is a major component, and this is where Mac OS X is vastly superior to cooperative multitasking, lack-of-memory-protection Mac OS 9 and below. I prefer the classic Mac UI, but Mac OS X had a better UX. | |
| ▲ | flomo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | On the other hand, the low-point was MacOS 7.6.1 Update 2 or whatever. |
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| ▲ | steve-atx-7600 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What was different in the jobs era were the goals and trajectory toward achieving them. The tibook was just a first step. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Seems like a just-so story. They shipped some rough computers over the course of that trajectory. | | |
| ▲ | PeaceTed 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It used to be a case of, always avoid the first generation of a product as they would only get it right the second time around. They were brilliant at pushing for new stuff but it came with the issues of pushing a little to fast at times. |
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| ▲ | ardit33 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apple Silicon was started by/during the Steve Jobs era in 2010. You seeing the rewards now (well starting in 2019), because it takes so long to produce a chip. |
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| ▲ | throw_m239339 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Well Jobs obviously took risks, way more than Cook ever did. But Yes, Silicon was absolutely the right move, incredible performance leap, at an accessible price (but one could argue it's more of a failure from Intel). Now from a "culture re-definition" perspective, nothing is going to top what Apple did in the 80's and what they did again in the 2000's with the iPhone. |
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| ▲ | coolestguy 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The guy who oversaw the silicon change is the one who's likely going to be the next CEO |
