It's incredible to me that Apple has maybe 10 major products and they somehow can't focus on any of them not named "iPhone". Between the keyboards, thermal issues in the previous Mac Pro, ignoring the iPad's software, and other issues I've probably forgotten, what exactly is their dysfunction?
It's incredible to me that MacBooks are considered professional-grade hardware in the silicon valley hivemind, between crippled functionality thanks to the form-over-function design and outright defectivity as described in this article.
I feel like they did make investments in MacBooks, just not the kind I want. I care less about a thinner laptop. Keep the same thickness with a nicer screen and overall build quality. Apples focused abit too much on aesthetic over function, but with the recent 16” MacBook, they’re making course corrections.
Personally I can’t figure out my development workflow on Windows. I tried the Linux subsystem stuff and IO was just too damn slow. 15 minutes to install a few package dependencies. For a while, I ended up running Ubuntu on another machine that I would SSH into for all my side projects just so I have my trusty zshell and all the nice package managers and other build tools.
It’s not OS dependent. It’s just that doing it on Mac let’s me focus on the problem I want to solve vs non value add stuff like just getting things configured.
I’m relatively fast using zshell, vim, iTerm, tab space to quickly search and open a file or program, adding things to my .zsh rc file, quickly installing packages, etc. In Windows, everything is slower, and I generally feel disoriented.
Something as simple as running docker wouldn’t work on windows. Apparently I need Windows 10 Pro edition... and I had the license too but upgrading would fail and rollback. It’s things like this that add up.
iPhones are >5x the revenue of Mac sales, and probably much more than that for profit:
"For the fiscal year 2019, the company's iPhone business accounted for approximately 54.7% of total sales; the company's Services segment made up approximately 17.7% of revenue; Mac sales generated 9.8% of total revenue; Wearables, Home and Accessories segment comprised 9.4% of the company's sales; the iPad accounted for 8.1% of the company's sales."
So what? iPhone making a ton of money isn't a good excuse for why my laptop made by one of the richest companies in the world is a worse experience than my old MacBook Pro.
