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Is Apple Pushing Away Professionals?
Barence writes "Is Apple turning its back on professional users to focus on consumers? That's the argument in this article, which claims Apple is alienating the creative professionals who have supported the company for 20 years or more. Fury over the dumbing down of Final Cut Pro, Apple's refusal to sell non-glossy screens and poor value hardware is fueling anger from professional Mac users. 'People will get hacked off. I'm only Apple because I want the OS, but if I could come up with a 'Hackintosh' with OS X, I'd be so happy,' claims one audio professional."
In the world of Apple the apparent definition of professional is someone who "liked Apple before it was cool." Now they are just ticked off by the whole "consumer" and "enthusiastic" aspects of using Apple products.
You can buy a macbook pro with an "antiglare" screen.
In the past, Apple catered to pros because they were the ones who would spend $10,000 on a Quadra or //fx model. However, since their pricing model has changed, they are best served at catering to Joe/Jane Consumer.
The only gripe I have is that Apple needs consider the IT market as well, and not just focus on consumers. Right now, Apple is doing well, but the enterprise is not just a huge market, but also is very hungry for Apple products. (As an IT person, oftentimes the top brass of companies will be using Macs as their own laptops. It makes me glad Lion has complete hard disk encryption, although having a TPM chip and BitLocker-like access would be ideal.) Apple could easily get some offerings into the IT sector. A redesigned Mac Pro that could work horizontally and fit on a drawer with attachable rack ears would be a start. A standalone disk array with redundant drive controllers and FCoE would bring them up to date for SMBs needing storage.
IT is definitely a market that Apple might do well in, although Apple's main success is with consumers.
Looks like the author has only done some superficial research on some aspects.
For example, 3ds Max is a Windows-only application, but it's far from the only major application in this sector. For example, LightWave licenses are less expensive, there's a Mac client as well and right now the features it has to offer are running circles around Max. And that's coming from a long-time Max user.
It's one of the major applications in the business, but far from dominating.
CAD is mostly done on Windows and *nix, but that's partly for historical reasons (code bas which has grown over decades in some cases).
Part of the problem is also the specialized hardware support on the Mac platform. You just can't expect an overpriced two year old entertainment graphics card to beat the results professional graphics software will achieve on a Quadro/Fire with optimized drivers and certified compatibility. That's like expecting an AMC Gremlin to beat a well-tuned Formula 1 racer.
At least microsoft targets business users as well.
However, if this trend continues, and other companies follow Apple in targeting the average Joe, then I foresee a sad future, where devices are locked down, professionals pay big bucks to get the tools they need, and universities and open source developers can't get hardware they can freely develop on.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
My boss upgraded to Lion, and I used it for about two minutes before deciding to stick with Snow Leopard for the foreseeable future. Lion feels like a toy.
Care you elaborate? Lion still has all of the same stuff as Snow Leopard. It also improves things like Time Machine and File Vault. The POSIX stuff is still there. If you do Objective-C development, then automatic reference counting with weak references is a huge improvement. The gesture interfaces are nicer, and the full-screen mode is great when you want to work in a terminal without distractions. The sandboxing stuff in the kernel is also massively improved, and a lot of the standard programs use it out of the box, so from a security standpoint 10.7 is a lot better (although I prefer the Capsicum stuff in FreeBSD 9).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's because they infiltrate and dominate all of the colleges that produce creative professionals. Any art/design school basically requires you to have a Mac, and as a result, almost every art/design job requires a Mac.
First off Apple still offers anti-glare displays as an option on ALL their MacBook Pros. So the rant about not offering matte displays is completely off base. In fact, I'm writing this post on a later model Macbook Pro with an antiglare screen and a quick glance at the store shows this option still available.
The real ire is the SOFTWARE, namely the utter fiasco that is Final Cut Pro X. But this is a well known issue and Apple has tried to smooth things over a bit by letting people DOWNGRADE to the last version. So it seems that Apple is well aware of how badly it messed things up and being that Final Cut has been a huge success until now, it only stands to reason that Apple will not make the same mistake twice and will release a new version that addresses their user's concerns. And while that is mere speculation, seeing how much money FCP has brought in and how much hardware it has ended up selling for Apple, it stands to reason that they will not idly stand by while their egg laying goose dies a painful death at the hands of an angered user base.
Also, Apple is more reliant upon developers now than ever. Those trendy consumer gadgets such as iPhone and iPad require a strong developer base, and it requires those developers to develop within OS X and with Apple Tools, even Flash Builder and Titanium require XCode to do the compiling. So to drive away your development community would also make no sense since that would only boost rivals creating apps for other products such as Android phones and tablets.
Apple is trying to normalize the look and feel of it's two operating systems iOS and OS X to make them not only easier to use for the consumer but easier to develop for for the developers. OS X Lion, while causing ire for it's sweeping UI changes now features a lot of the same features as iOS -- which from a UI development standpoint simplifies the development process.
So in the end, time will heal these wounds. Give it a few more months and see what the upcoming release of FCP has to offer it's core user base as well as how iCloud and iOS5 reshape how users and developers interoperate with OS X and iOS based devices. I think then a lot of these changes will make sense and some of the shock at these changes and the handful of missteps will die off.
I suspect that certain characteristics of the "Professional" market(notably the ones where it overlaps most strongly with the "IT" market) are a poor fit for Apple, so they will, indeed, be very temped to ditch them as time goes on.
The high end of the "Pro" market is touchy because they tend to depend on fairly large tangles of interconnected products: If asked "what do you use?" they might say "Final Cut"; but they actually mean "Final cut, two dozen specialized plugins, one or more boutique hardware components for capture or output, some sort of storage backend, possibly some in-house custom tools...".
One of Apple's strengths, particularly of late, has bee their ability(and willingness) to just pick up and say "fuck everybody who thinks some legacy feature/interface/API is good enough. As of today, it is the new shiny or nothing!"(see ADB, Adobe/64-bit Carbon, Final Cut Pro, etc.). Combined with some good taste, this has worked very well in the consumer and low-end "prosumer" markets. By largely ignoring legacy issues and expecting people to keep up or suck it up, they've been able to maintain a pretty aggressive release schedule for new and interesting features with a comparatively small engineering team. However, that is absolutely incompatible with the requirements of more esoteric professional environments(along with institutional IT, their less colorful but considerably larger counterparts). You just can't keep a spaghetti ecosystem of critical 3rd party hardware and software moving that fast, at least not at a price anybody is willing to pay.(Even fairly basic things, like supporting pro-level video cards, can be pretty dire, despite the fact that Mac Pro is more PC-like than it has ever been. The default options suck to an almost comical degree, and driver support for anything else is atrocious.)
For consumer and prosumer requirements, where it is much more likely that the integrated hardware and a small number of common software packages are enough, Apple's approach works just fine. It seems unlikely, though, that they can reconcile that with the requirements of the more specialized users. And, now that they have a big, lucrative, consumer market, their incentive to try isn't what it once might have been.
Macs are no longer limited to graphics artists and web designers. While that market may not be what it was for Apple it's being more than made up for in other areas. I'm a Data Center Architect and use nothing but Macs. Cisco, EMC, and VMware now offer Macs as standard offerings for their SEs and field people and last I heard Cisco had gone 30% Mac in just a few months. It's rare I'm in a meeting with those guys where Mac is not the majority.
Pushing away professionals? Hardly. Nice link bait.
I don't think Apple has been "turning away" from them. They had a definite and seemingly infallible edge when Photoshop and Illustrator were created and released for MacOS years ago; the PC was long behind them in this department, so those weren't really an option.
Today, aesthetic quirks aside, the only difference between a Macbook and a PC laptop is the Macbook's ability to natively run OS X. Both of the aforementioned titles are available (and widely used) on Windows without limitations. Worse, Windows has many more titles and options available than the Mac does because there are many more Windows developers out there than OS X developers. (I wouldn't say that Windows is any easier to develop for than OS X, but Visual Studio is really, really nice.) On the other hand, many people find Macbooks to be extremely pretty (because they are) and OS X to be easier to use and more secure, though we all know the "bad guys" are slowly chipping away at the latter advantage. We all know that Macbook, iPhone, iPad and a Starbucks Grande-size Latte are the holy trinity in being "cool;" the PC is not a good substitute for this.
Apple has, and hopefully always be, about making profit by catering to the consumer. Let's not get deluded about that.
I'm not a professional at all but an amateur who has used Apple professional tools for music. I was also excited about Final Cut Pro X since I also like to create shorts and wring every last bit of power from iMovie.
I read the message boards to see what was going on with the different tools and--personal opinion--some professionals aren't very. First, as a professional you constantly evaluate your workflows and tools to deliver your end product. I get that some people do not want to change what works, but I moved from Sonar Producer (DAW) to Logic Pro with very little issues and could leverage some of the different features quickly (of course, I did miss Sonar exclusive features too). Some posters on the boards were simply not able to understand there might be better workflows using the power of new tools. Second, some of the tools added were phenomenal which would probably save them enough time to focus on how to do work with the new tool. Third, the squeaky wheels got a lot of press while many on the boards were very happy with the changes and improvements. I personally found the enhancements fairly exciting based on the limitations I hit in iMovie every day.
From my own experience would I be upset if Logic Pro started looking like Garageband...yes. Would I adapt to leverage what it offers..absolutely. I already find myself using Garageband for quick songs because it is far easier to get in and out quickly; there is some real value there.
As technologist, what would we say to a professional programmer who never wanted to learn a new language, evaluate new programming tools (e.g. IDE) or leverage new build automation?
Finally, it is fortunate there is a great ecosystem of video and audio tools that can fill any gaps in Apple's portfolio. That's a good thing
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
I'm an Apple guy (I like it, I have no special needs for Windows only software), but if Apple doesn't reverse a trend of alienating a group (albeit a small group) of previously staunch supporters, could this be a first step to Apple losing what professional footprint it does have?
I'm a Windows guy, and I've always hated most Apple things I've come into contact with. But I'm also a professional in the video production and broadcast industry... and Final Cut Studio has always been the best A/V production suite in existence. I've used Adobe CS, Vegas, EDIUS, and several I can't remember the names of... Adobe takes second place, but it was still nowhere near as good as Final Cut. Now that Final Cut has been ruined, Apple and I are breaking up for good.
Apple used to be cool when they were creative, and encouraged creativity. It was you and Apple fighting the battle against entropy.
Ever since the iLine, and Steve Jobs turning from a benevolent genius to a narcissistic, goose stepping lunatic, the scene has changed to apple being creative, and you can too, just as long as you're creative in the "Apple" sanctioned way.
When it comes to the iSheep, (read as the great unwashed, non-technological masses), taht's exactly what they want. They want to be "creative" by proxy. They get to taste genius, and all they ahve to do is spend daddy's money.
Unfotunately, the creative types don't need restrictions. Yeah sure, being creative with IBM used to be like trudging through the mud, and at the time comparatively, using MacOS would feel like ice skating in comparison. But now, you MUST do what Apple says, or you're toast. Dumbing down of interfaces to conform to the masses is merely one facet of it. The uberban of Flash is another. And by the way, think what you like about flash, but the bottom line is that you're having your technology choices dictated to by a company.
For all these reasons, I have left apple. I refuse to buy an Apple product anymore because I am smart enough to make my own choices, and unfortunately, the solid brick that is Apple is *almost* what I want, but since I can't customise it at all, it is *entirely* not what I need.
Good luck with the mass market Apple, but I am not the only professional who's sick and tired of being corralled into your line. The bitten apple used to be a sign of the rebels; A homage to the greatest rebel Computer Scientist in history, Alan Turing, who had cracked the enigma codes through the sheer might of his intellect, who was then crushed by the same English government he had saved, as unfortunately he was gay. Being faced with the choice of imprisonment or chemical castration, he chose the third route of committing suicide. As he adored the fable of Snow White, he dipped an apple in poison, and took a bite.
THIS was once the spirit of Apple Inc. Shame on you for losing your way.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I'm a research scientist at particle physics institute and my anecdotal experience is the opposite: Nowadays, it seems like at least 3/4 of the laptops I see at conferences are Apple laptops (plus a growing amount of iPads). The desktops at my institute are either Linux or OS X.
OS X is a great environment to use LaTeX in, make presentations (Keynote + LaTeXit for equations is awesome), code scientific software or run apps like Mathematica or Matlab.
What you are not seeing is that Apple is trying to change at times what it MEANS to be a professional, how they work...
'Professional'.
That word doesn't mean what Apple thinks it means. For the purposes of this thread, professional is much closer to fuzzyfuzzyfungus' definition of someone who has "Final cut, two dozen specialized plugins, one or more boutique hardware components for capture or output, some sort of storage backend, possibly some in-house custom tools..." then Apple's view of a couple of metrosexuals hammering out some cheezy TV ad at Starbucks. People with a serious workflow that does what THEY want it to do, not what Steve Jobs thinks they should be doing.
Room for both groups, obviously, but the writing is pretty much on the wall - Apple is going to be a smaller and smaller part of serious professional's workflow as the Windows ecosystem improves and evolves. No biggy really, if you decide to ditch OS X, most of your Apple hardware will work fine for the next couple of years. Nothing is etched in stone anyway, things change. Software changes, hardware changes.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's because they infiltrate and dominate all of the colleges that produce creative professionals. Any art/design school basically requires you to have a Mac, and as a result, almost every art/design job requires a Mac.
BS. I recently financed my stepson's education at Vancouver Institute of Media Arts, a fairly well known "art/design" school. We went up to the campus, looked around. Lots and lots of Windows. A couple of Macs in the corner, sitting unused.
Talking to the faculty (who to a person started out on Macs) one finds two major issues: Graphics cards for the MacPros suck hard compared to Windows offering and Apple's random walk as far as long term strategies make it hard for a company to invest a couple of million dollars in Apple gear. Nobody suggests using Macs for anything other than cool laptops.
There were a bunch of MacBooks running around - all running Bootcamp.
So, you're view of the Mac centric artistic universe was probably true a decade ago, but it certainly isn't true now. Windows 7 really is a pretty good, quite stable applications platform. Same for the Windows toolchain. And, as TFA points out, SolidWorks and 3DS Max, two very important 3D programs are Windows only.
Apple has lost this battle and really isn't even fighting a credible rearguard action.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Glossy screens do not make color accurate.
Working in a color managed environment with color aware applications is what does. That means using calibration devices to measure all the color output of your devices, printers monitors etc... and creating color profiles.
Glossy screens can make blacks look deeper, but also have a lot of glare and reflection. Pros arent looking for deeper blacks, they're looking for accurate blacks and color temperature. A monitor that puts out a good wide color gamut, that fits into the adobe rgb color space.
Most monitors are too bright actually for accurate color representation.
The mac pro is about $1000 - $1500 over priced as it is and only 3gb ram at $2500?
The mini is ok but it should be a little bigger for better cooling / easier to get to hdd are the 2 big things also bigger will give it room for desktop cpus / better video chips/ more ram slots.
Base mini with 5400 RPM HDD's?
The sever mini has quad and 2 hdd's but why do have to pay for sever and a 2th HDD just to get quad? and they it has Intel video but the mini other that has a low end ati chip but no quad (best is a Core i7 dual)
Also a mid tower at $800-$900? $1000-$1500 with desktop cpu quad core or better with at least 2-3 pci-e slots 1 X16 dual wide for video card and maybe 1-2 x4 or x1 slots. 4 ram slots or 6 ram slots (if useing higher end i7's) 2 or more HDD bays, DVDRW or a bay for 1 also 1 or 2 TB ports.
Maybe have have on board video with the base system having no video card.
The mac pro can be the dual cpu (dual quad or better) 4 slot (at least all x16 or x8) system with 4 or more HDD bays. With the room for 12 or more ram slots.
Maybe even room for dual high end video cards.
The imac are ok but can we get a way to get to the HDD with out having to take the screen off?
Have the Xserve come back or let mac os sever run on any hardware in a VM.
In terms of workstation (equivalent to some server systems), the pricing is pretty competitive.. where Apple falters is the lower end workstation offerings (sub $2000). I usually to my desktop/workstation builds in the $1200-2000 range, where a Mac Pro isn't an option.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
THIS was once the spirit of Apple Inc. Shame on you for losing your way.
Reminds me what Jason Newsted said, when asked for his response to people saying Metallica had sold out: "Yeah we sold out. We sold out every arena we played for the last five years."
Until the general public stops eating up every single thing they produce, it will never change. They make far too much money to give half a crap about the loyal customers that kept them viable before the iCrap era. They'd rather you just shut up and keep buying those iPhones/iPads. It's sad, but true.
"1k mac book and that 300-500 dollar intel based acer, or hp, or e-machine share the same intel cpu, foxconn motherboard, ram brand and hard drive. all your paying for is casing, logo, and os, "
and greater testing and hardware integration and better heat and power management and the magnetic cable attachment and walk-up service centers in most major cities. And nobody else really has something as good as the Air --- because it requires expensive physical mechanical and thermal design and custom parts. As you move from the 1990's technology of interchangable taiwanese parts with little integration costs, the value of Apple's more expensive engineering can be more apparent.
In audiophile equipment, it's well known that a large cost is the fancy machined aluminium case. It's actually worth something.
Name a single thing you used to be able to do on Mac OS X that you can't do anymore on Mac OS X. They fumbled around with the new Final Cut Pro release--and they're trying to recover from that now. There is absolutely nothing else you can point to. You can still run Flash on OSX.
The 'iLine' is a new line of products specifically targeted at the handheld/mobile market. It has different constraints and craves a different solution. In case you haven't noticed, they're doing pretty well. Millions of people who otherwise wouldn't be using smart devices now are; and it hasn't prevented anyone from doing anything they could do before on Macs or any other kind of computer. If you think there is something bad about a type of technology just because it is aimed at non-technical users; then you just flat out do not understand the point of technology. Like many other so-called nerds on this forum, you think the point of technology is to create some sort of exclusive club with a sign out front that says "you must know *this* much about tech to enter".
BTW: if you are naive enough to think that the absence of web standards leads to a better, more democratic internet, then you are a lost cause.
Nobody cares that you are having some sort of one-sided feud with Apple. What the hell is your deal with Turing, anyway? did you just watch some documentary?
That is the funny thing about Apple. I got a Mac to try out some iOS development, and was truly suprised at just how bad the UI was. Macs were supposed to be good at UI, and it turns out that they are pretty darn bad at it. Yet the Apple fans keep instisting that "I'm holding it wrong". I agree, and have stated myself many times, that the single menu at the top made perfectly fine sense when we were running on a single 640 x480 screen. Back then, pixels were precious. Today it is just bad UI.
The fact that the X button sometimes closes the application, and sometimes leaves the application running without a UI is also bad. The green + shrinking the screen is a poor UI choice. The list goes on and on.
It is just strange that the UI gets held up as Apples triumph, when the UI is sub par and the good parts of a OSX are under the hood.
Apple has already been highly successful in alienating all the geeks (I include myself in this) and pushing them over to android (and to developing for it, and recommending it to their friends). Policy decisions which drive the "love the product; hate the company" would include:
- constant lockdown of iDevices. (yes, we understand that jailbreaking should only be for the techies, should be warranty-voiding, and should not be easy for
"grandma" to do by accident and then get upset about the consequences, but if we really want to, we should be able to).
- making it so hard for iPods to work on Linux - why can't they help out the libgpod devels by publishing specs.
- support for patents in general, and litigating against the competition rather than competing fairly. Also, DRM (though they've now mostly learnt that lesson).
- iTunes not working on Linux (or under Wine).
- not giving back as much as they take. Yes, Darwin is BSD, so it's legal, but it's really not cool to give back so little.
- killing off the "hacker" culture that they began with. Apple's hardware is really hard to tinker with: of course some of this is just because it's harder to experiment with a BGA A4 CPU than a DIL socketed 68k, but at least making parts available to hobbyists, and not suing them, would be a good start!
Finally, a personal gripe: Apple have lead the industry into making sure that only shortscreen-LCDs are available on any new hardware. I want 16:12 aspect, not 16:9 (and no doubt soon to be 16:8) !
What dumb ass "creative professional" does all their work on a laptop screen?
What dumb ass 'technical know-it-all' doesn't understand the value of having a portable workstation?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I dont think engineers and such have ever been target customers for Apple. But if you mean image/video field workers as professionals, then you probably are right. Apple product lines are just following the industry trend of consumerism and becoming more targeted for home users, rather than enterprises(for which they never were targetting to begin with).
The only "professional" I've ever associated with Apple products was in the image/video arena. Used to be, if you were "serious" about making a living doing graphical and video work you had an apple workstation and used photoshop and final cut.
So, is Apple pushing them away? Maybe. I think TFA might be a little flamebait-ish tho. Apple has made some decisions that might be pushing away the pros, but I don't think their decision was to push away the pros. Follow what I'm sayin?
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
I program extremely well on it. i'm a professional python developer who's used OSX+TextMate for the last 6 years, and would not switch away unless under duress. I REALLY like the key binding to moving the cursor around and have built up a great reflex memory for it. Perhaps that your problem, simply reflex memory. Understandable. I have a really hard time with windows based keyboards when I use a "real" pc - but no such issues in a VM because the VM keyboard is mapped to the apple one. Just an opposing view.
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
I think, when people say the UI is triumph, they are referring to two things. One is that the UI is OpenGL composited and thus feels very solid. Two is the lack of really, really mind numbing stupidity like un-re-sizeable dialogs (as in the control panel or connect-network-drive UI in windows) and dumb-ass button choices like "yes-no" not "verb-cancel". Honestly, OSX IS a triumph... only when you compare it to windows. That may be damning with faint praise, but it's still praise :)
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
With Windows or common Linux desktop environments when you maximize a window the window takes up the full screen, regardless of whether there's enough content in the window to fill the whole screen. This often leaves vast areas of white space on the sides and bottom of the window.
On the Mac, the green button zooms the window to be big enough to see everything that's inside the window, and if you click it again it just returns to the size it was before. The maximize button to exit full screen in Windows behaves *identically* to the green button in OS X when exiting full screen. It returns the window to a user-determined size that doesn't necessarily show the full content of the window. Your lack of understanding of it doesn't make it bad design.
In the same way, having the icons on the right side makes more sense, because normally the windows cover up the space on the left. When I hit the green button, I can see 1. All of the content of the window, 2. the icons on my desktop, and 3. the windows behind my front window. How exactly is having vast areas of white space within the front window better than being able to still see the full content of the front window but also being able to use your much-valued screen real estate to see other things in the unused space around and behind it?
The x button closes the application if the application is only capable of having one window(like utility programs) and closes just the window if the application is capable of having multiple windows. This makes it so you don't have to wait for a whole application to relaunch if you accidentally close the last window. But most Mac users know that you can hit command q to completely close a program(which is the functionality you're claiming that OS X doesn't have) or command w to close just the window. It's interesting that you'd deride OS X for the fact that Windows lacks that granularity of function.
It's a culture shock that all switchers go through. I had it myself, and I've seen it umpteen times in others. It just tales a little time to get used to what's different from your previous platform.
If you were switching from Mac to PC you'd be wondering where the eject, volume up/down, brightness up/down, media control, and Expose/Spaces/Dashboard buttons were on your new keyboard.
You make a good point about the menu. But you don't have to have the menu on your primary monitor. You can put it on any monitor, it's an option in System Preferences. But after a while you'll find you're rarely using the menu in apps that you're familiar with. You get used to keyboard shortcuts. And most actions tend to be on toolbars that are attached to application windows, and these are generally customisable.
But there's no point me or anyone else trying to persuade you. If you are using the Mac as you primary computer, then as I say you'll get used to it. You'll develop a whole new muscle memory different to your Linux muscle memory. And you'll discover a whole bundle of things you prefer abut the Mac UI from what was on your old OS.
Any narrow advantage held by the Power architecture was quickly disappearing by 2003 when the first Operton chips with AMD64/SSE2 hit the market (for users able to jump to 64-bits), and pretty much obliterated with the introduction of the Core Duo in January 2006.
x86 had an ugly childhood, but it turns out there wasn't anything desperately wrong with its performance potential. Jobs made such a big deal of x86 being somehow deeply inferior. The x86 is deeply inferior when you try to build efficient devices under a watt. The little tricks used in x86 to achieve high performance are expensive in power consumption and nearly impossible to fix without an instruction set overhaul. ARM was the true victor.
You really have the edict entirely backward. It was Jobs' edict that Apple would slug it out on a platform with a small market share, and for which IBM could not afford to develop to market-leading performance on an indefinite basis. Finally Jobs lifted the anti-Intel edict because he had no choice. Not just in performance, but also available production quantity.
When you get right down to it, I'm sure Jobs regarded PowerPC as a convenient walled garden. He didn't want his miracle machine to become too compatible. But it was probably also a huge burden to carry your own ISA for 10% market share. Look how they've done since.
The money made by Microsoft, Apple and Google, 1985 until today
The decade of PowerPC pretty much corresponds with the Apple doldrums. Imagine that.
I'm curious whether his reality distortion field penetrates from the after life, or whether Gandalf the White will arrive to perform an exorcism at long last.
fanboys justifying fanboys. nice.
that would cost about $5k without the picture of the fruit on the side.
"lol look we're professional! it has FIBER NETWORKING!" hahahhahhahahha jesus, you seriously need to check into apple rehab.
You seem to have gotten the whole point of the menu-on-top thing wrong. It's not a matter of maximizing usable space in a low-res environment, it's a consequence of Fitts's Law: The acquisition time for a target on screen is something like log(distance/size). If the menus were on the windows, the distance would be smaller, but by having the menus against an edge of the screen, you can't overshoot towards the edge, so the target size is effectively infinite. No bad UI about that.
Also, leaving an application running without a UI is a perfectly reasonable idea, once you dissociate applications and windows -- in fact, there are many, many programs that practically demand it (mail, bittorrent, IM in general). If you look at the windows world, this distinction also exists, except that windows handled this in a completely hackish way until Windows 7, which was via the system tray icons. Windows 7 finally supports windowless applications properly, though that's a recent advance and many applications still don't support it. I can't honestly think of any non-X11 applications that actually close completely when you close the last window.
All in all, though, I agree: the best part of modern Macs is what's underneath the hood. They're effectively the only consumer-grade machines in the market that are purpose-made to run Unix.
The fact that the X button sometimes closes the application, and sometimes leaves the application running without a UI is also bad.
Why is it bad? It's a developer choice do do whichever is more appropriate for the app. On Windows an app MUST close when its last window closes, unless the developer puts it into the system tray.
The reasoning for leaving the app open when a multiple document app has it's last window closed is straight forward. It's a common usage pattern to finish working on one document and then start working on another. If apps quit when the last window closes, then this happens:
The user closes the first document, and the UI to open the next document (File/Open) disappears. They then have to restart the app, which involves waiting, before they ca open their next document.
But for apps which are not document based, that argument doesn't apply. Closing the window on a single window app really does mean you've finished working with that app for the time being.
Then there are other reasons for choosing one behaviour or another. If an app does useful work even when there are no Windows, then of course it makes sense to keep it open. iTunes is an obvious example.
There's a reason why Mac developers have this choice and Windows developers don't get it (apart from the system tray utility option). Because with Windows, the disappearance of the last window means that access to the menu has also disappeared. That's not the case with Mac.
That's an interesting trinity you've got there. Although if christianity can worship a trinity and still be monotheistic, I guess a trinity with four members isn't do big a stretch.
Audio Pros are all snobs.
Well, that's a problem with elitism in general, and is hardly limited to Apple users, but they're guilty of it. In the real world, a dispassionate evaluation of one's own requirements generally results in better purchasing decisions, a close match between work requirements and the equipment meant to service them. That's one complaint I have with the Apple-using community: they tend to see all problem domains as having the only solution in terms of Apple. When your only tool is a hammer ... well. The world of computing is vast, the needs of users varied, and the products of one single company cannot reasonably be expected to serve the needs of everyone.
... but why would you want to?"
The other aspect to that mindset is the ability to rationalize away faults and missing capabilities. Blows my mind. I've had more than a few conversations with Apple users that usually run along these lines:
"How come your nav is still talking? You're playing an MP3 and browsing the Web."
"Multitasking."
"Huh. Well, mine doesn't do that
"???"
Yes yes, I know I'm talking about an early iPhone, that's not the point. I'm talking about attitudes here, not the hardware.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You use dumb terminology like "iCrap" because you're afraid of change.
No, I'm afraid of a future where all of our tech goods are so locked down we can't even change the fucking battery without voiding a warranty. If you were able to see the forest for the trees you would be afraid, too.
Depends on location. Beats me why, but you can get the U2711 for the equivalent of 600 dollars easily in Sweden for example. Cinema display at its best is 950. And for that spare money, I'd buy a good quality Monitor Arm.
Indeed. The UI hack that things like Photoshop and Word have used on Windows, making a huge window with a menu bar and a gigantic empty space in the middle for where your documents show up is just awful. With the global menubar and applications persisting after last window closed means that the user is mentally separating "close" from "quit". On Windows, closing a window could do one of a few things (close window and put in tray, close and quit, close and go back to empty space MDI) but for most applications on a Mac, closing a window is just closing a window and quitting the Application is an entirely different action.
Apple is not the same company it was even in the 1990s. Yes, it's more profitable. Yes, they have a wider range of products.
No, they are not a computing company. I've made this argument here recently, and people argue the nitty points without looking at the broader picture.
Apple does not produce a server platform (hardware + software). This right here should be telling: they make consumer products, not production products. Even their "Server" OS is quite lacking.
Apple has been short-changing developers on their platform for some time, both with their developer programs for App Store and how they've made fairly drastic API changes without giving the bigger shops a forewarning.
Every single one of Apple's products in the past 10 years has been a reductionism - a move towards minimalism. This is contrary to what a professional wants. Professionals need more, better tools, not fewer.
Apple's consumer 'media players' intentionally lack features audio and video professionals would like, such as the ability to do what the Sony Discman could do 10 years ago (record high quality lossless audio). Playback quality is also significantly lacking.
The distinction is nuanced, but there is a distinction. Apple doesn't really give half a shit to the nuanced or professional user. Many graphics professionals abandoned Apple a long time ago due to dick moves they pulled that made things difficult for eg. Adobe to continue producing software or for graphics artists to work effectively with the platform (threading, multiprocessing, etc.).
Anyone who thinks Apple is still a "computing" company and not a "consumer electronic device" company needs to pay better attention. Apple has not done a single innovative thing in the world of computing for quite some time. Marketing, sales, and consumer products? Absolutely - they're incredible. But don't expect them to be the same company they were for professional needs in even the late 90s.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This is the driving motivator behind Apple bashing. It's an attempt to convince yourself that you are so damn smart for not using something that's popular.
Since when has 5% of the market meant "popular"? Only when there's an "i" in front of it...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If change is good, then what about the ability to change a battery, or a software configuration? If I weary of SuSE 11.4, I can change distros. How does one do this on an iPad?
I dislike such appliances not because they represent change, but because they prevent it.
You've never heard of a vertical market, have you. You have no clue what it is, nor what depends on it. Worse, you have no clue how it doesn't work under the Apple scheme.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Also, leaving an application running without a UI is a perfectly reasonable idea, once you dissociate applications and windows -- in fact, there are many, many programs that practically demand it (mail, bittorrent, IM in general). If you look at the windows world, this distinction also exists, except that windows handled this in a completely hackish way until Windows 7, which was via the system tray icons. Windows 7 finally supports windowless applications properly, though that's a recent advance and many applications still don't support it.
Programs that still have user interface demands (even if transitory, like IM) should have some means of accessing them - and in Windows 7, they still exist in the system tray (usually bunched up in the sys tray popup). A program that does not need user interface should be a service - not a program.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
and walk-up service centers in most major cities.
I've always wondered about this... Why do people consider this better? If my HP breaks, I call HP - and someone is out the very next day to where I am, to fix/repair/replace what is needed. No need for me to find and trek down to an Apple store (if there is one). I've used the Dell and HP on-site service rarely, but it's invaluable. Even had a tech guy show up the next day at Ice Harbor dam in Eastern Washington when working out in the middle of nowhere (and 4 hours from an Apple store).
Having the company come to me and service my laptop is infinitely better than my having to go to the company...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Ever since the iLine, and Steve Jobs turning from a benevolent genius to a narcissistic, goose stepping lunatic, the scene has changed to apple being creative, and you can too, just as long as you're creative in the "Apple" sanctioned way.
Do you know anything about Steve Jobs' history?
He was always a "goose stepping lunatic", as you put it. He was always obsessed with his idea of perfection, to the point where many of the early software engineers on the Mac project absolutely hated his guts. If you disagreed with his ideas, you weren't just wrong, you were wrong, stupid, and bad.
One of the reasons he was forced out at Apple the first time was that he was absolutely awful to work with (there's a bracing account in one of the biographies about him of a trip he took to Sony's floppy drive factory in Japan, and he made such an ass of himself that Mike Markkula puled him aside and reprimanded him).
Steve Jobs was many things, but he was never, ever benevolent. He's always been a cult-of-personality dictator from his earliest days, and Jobs was always trying to push people into his vision of what genius and creativity was. This notion that he was some great supporter of freedom of computer users is nothing but marketing tripe. Jobs... and by extension, Apple... wasn't so much for freedom as they were for a world that they thought was cool, and they were going to make you pay plenty for the privilege of being part of it. You make it sound like Jobs was some kind of technical-artistic libertarian. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jobs wasn't fighting for your freedom to do things the way you wanted to. He was fighting for your dollars so you'd do things the way he wanted you to.
The only difference between Early Jobs and Late Jobs is that Late Jobs was actually a good businessman, due to hard lessons learned from his money-losing experience at NeXT.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I was skeptical of the glossy screen when I got my last MacBook Pro, so I figured I'd try a little real work at the Apple Store before buying it. Within minutes I found that I had to bob my head up, down, left, and right to see around spots of screen glare that obscured content and controls. That seems a ridiculous trade-off to me.
I know that in your home you can set things up so that there is no screen glare. Does anyone really stay that static any more? I take my laptop all over the place and use it in different environments that I don't control - I'd have to find a "good spot" in each case or bob my head around dodging screen glare. I guess this is something you're supposed to get used to? I don't mind that
I'll stick with anti-glare, thanks.
Today, aesthetic quirks aside, the only difference between a Macbook and a PC laptop is the Macbook's ability to natively run OS X.
Also...the PC laptops are cheaper, easier to maintain, and offer a broader range of features and quality components than the MBs.
For example: I'm writing this on a Thinkpad X60t, which has a tablet-convertible display, Wacom digitizer (active, pressure-sensitve stylus), touchscreen, 3-button mouse, IBM trackpoint, BOE-Hydis AFFS+ LCD (better than IPS)...and it weighs about 3½ pounds.
Apple has never made any machine that comes remotely close to that level of functionality and quality.
And then there is maintenance to consider. Ever have a keyboard key stick or fail on a MBP keyboard? Apple Store wants $200+ to fix it. And with good reason. The MacBooks are built to be disposable devices. Replacing a keyboard requires not only a heap of screws/fasteners, and removal of various subcomponents, but also some adhesives, and some bend & break tabs.
On our Thinkpads, I've replaced keyboards in less than 1 minute, 4 screws. On Dell laptops, 30 seconds, 2 screws. Hard drive, 1 screw. Memory, 2 screws. Etc. IBM and Dell designed their computers to be maintained. Apple did not.
Apple has, and hopefully always be, about making profit by catering to the consumer. Let's not get deluded about that.
As long as you mean the "highest-end" consumer.
From it's very beginning, Apple has charged a heavy premium for their products, and targeted them at the top 5% of consumers. The iPod and iPhone are radical changes from Apple's historical market. But...they still have that "high end" residue.
Historically:
The Apple IIe was the longest-lived Apple computer. Released 1983 for $1400, competing against the equally-capable Commodore 64 which was released 1982 for $595. The Apple IIe was produced for 10 years. I don't have sales numbers for the IIe only, but all Apple II models combined sold only 5-6 million units. By contrast, the single model C64 sold around 15 million units.
The Apple Lisa cost $10,000 in 1983. That's $22,000 in 2011 dollars. Not exactly a "consumer" product, unless the average consumer thinks a computer should cost as much as their car.
The first Macintosh, in 1984, cost $2500. Somewhat more than $5000 in today's dollars. But by then they had competition in the PC space, which cost much much less.
Over the years I have owned & used many Apple computers...Apple II series, Mac Plus/SE, Mac II models, PowerBooks (including that nifty dockable PowerBook Duo 230, etc. Since the mid-1990s, they have ALWAYS cost more and delivered less functionality than high-end PCs. So I went from being a mostly Apple user, to a mixed Apple/PC user, to a mostly PC user.
Portable devices are a brave new world. Apple has a very clear lead in design & technology & marketing & retail clout right now. I love my iPhone, much as I loved my first Mac and first PowerBook. But I totally expect that it will be replaced by a cheaper, more flexible system in about 5 years.
The fact that the X button sometimes closes the application, and sometimes leaves the application running without a UI is also bad.
Why is it bad? It's a developer choice do do whichever is more appropriate for the app. On Windows an app MUST close when its last window closes, unless the developer puts it into the system tray.
The reasoning for leaving the app open when a multiple document app has it's last window closed is straight forward. It's a common usage pattern to finish working on one document and then start working on another. If apps quit when the last window closes, then this happens: The user closes the first document, and the UI to open the next document (File/Open) disappears. They then have to restart the app, which involves waiting, before they ca open their next document.
But for apps which are not document based, that argument doesn't apply. Closing the window on a single window app really does mean you've finished working with that app for the time being.
Then there are other reasons for choosing one behaviour or another. If an app does useful work even when there are no Windows, then of course it makes sense to keep it open. iTunes is an obvious example.
There's a reason why Mac developers have this choice and Windows developers don't get it (apart from the system tray utility option). Because with Windows, the disappearance of the last window means that access to the menu has also disappeared. That's not the case with Mac.
Mac applications act this way due to legacy decisions made for the original circa 1984 Mac, not because it's the right way to do things. At the time, it took the Mac a long time to start applications. Apple decided on this behavior to make the computer more responsive when opening new documents. Now days, document open much more quickly and this behavior is no longer required. Personally, the behavior drives me nuts because when I click on a running app in the doc that has no open windows, the program doesn't do anything. It should, at that point, actually respond; open a new project, give me a file-open dialog box, anything but sit there looking pretty. Programs that do something useful in the background with no open files are few and far between. If a program has something useful to do in the background than it should be implemented as a light-weight daemon, rather than a full blown app like iTunes.
The other issue with this behavior is that it is not easy to tell at a glance to tell what programs are running. The strength of the Windows Task Bar is that it clearly separates running programs from application launch icons. Certainly, this is a matter of what people are accustomed to, but for myself and I think many people who are accustomed to windows, this is infuriating.
Which is where anti-glare is the most popular. Glossy makes some sense on laptops because you get better light transmission which means more brightness with less battery. Ok fine. However on a desktop screen, that's not an issue. You have more backlight than you need. Only real reason to go glossy is on cheap displays it is cheaper to do right. Well again, not an issue here, mac displays are high end. However they aren't just glossy, they are monkey-fuck retarded glossy because they have a glass cover.
That's the issue. It isn't what professionals want either, it is what fanboys who like shiny things want. Go have a look at NEC's PA series of monitors, or Eizo's ColorEdge series, or LaCie's 300 or 500 series. All matte all the time. These are what professionals want (and use) they are designed with pro features in mind, like hardware calibration, quality IPS or VA panels, fully adjustable stands, and matte screens.
Well Apple doesn't do that. They use good IPS panels, and charge a premium price, but they provide a simple tilt stand, no ability for calibration, and a highly glossy screen. That isn't what pros are after.
Hence supporting the assessment of the "Apple pushing away professionals."
Isn't Apple's whole marketing strategy to make a platform that "just works" - as soon as you start talking about having people code their own drivers you might as well go with either windows (where EVERYTHING has a driver from the vendor), or linux (which is FOSS). Especially if you couple it with the software missing features you need in the first place.
so the target size is effectively infinite. No bad UI about that.
That would be true if the menu bar were the target. But typically we target menu ITEMS.
It also fails to account for the fact that AFTER we use a menu item, we tend to want to put the cursor somewhere in the application window we were using... which if on a different monitor in a 2 large monitor system is a small target a VERY long way away. And we wouldn't have to make that trip if we hadn't had to go up to the menu bar.
Trying to suggest suggest the OSX menu bar is a good application of interface design using fitte's law in a multi-monitor setup is like concluding the best place to put the ketchup on a large picnic table would be at the bottom of a steep slide attached to the picnic table that ends in a brick wall.
Anyone who wants the ketchup can just run down the slid at full tilt into the brick wall... its pure genius.
Yes, but the way it works now is better where you can have a good view of you current space but still easily transfer stuff to a different one without having to have everything smaller still... Also the way fullscreen integrates with Spaces is really good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would completely agree that the non-visible changes to Lion are mostly good. It's very stable. However, I think many people have genuine complaints about the user interface. Apple changed things for no good reason, just to do it. When Microsoft does that, people complain like mad yet when Apple does it, it's an attack on users.
For example, why can't i click away from a widget to get out of dashboard now. I have to click a button in the corner or hit escape. It made it much less efficient to use. Why did they invert the mouse? I had to find a command line hack to fix that because the mouse preferences don't show it for a Microsoft mouse with the proper driver installed. What's the point of launchpad? I think I've used it once. Why did they make address book and ical look like "real" items. It's ugly and requires extra clicks to add calendar entries from different calendars. The list goes on and on.
The problem is that all the good apple and next people retired. We've got younger programmers who grew up with web pages that all look different designing the user interface. They don't care about HCI guidelines or consistency anymore. Windows is more consistent and polished. That's just sad. I hate Windows 7's 5+ clicks to do anything UI, but at least it's predicable.
This isn't just it's different.. it's different in a bad way. That is a legitimate complaint.
I don't hate everything about lion. Safari, iTunes, Time Machine, and Terminal all work well. iCloud is nice (except for the lack of merging accounts). GCD (libdispatch) is awesome.
I suspect the next OS X release will be much better. They'll probably flush out how crazy they want to get duplicating the iOS UI by then and finish what they started.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
What happened to Rosetta Stone?
Play Command HQ online
I own a Mac Pro tower, Apple are definitely pushing away the professionals. Their video pipeline is top quality awesomeness. But... the Xeon based systems are WAAAAY overpriced. Apple want $1050 for 24gb of ram. I bought the same RAM from a normal vender for $300. ECC server ram 1333mhz DDR3 exactly like Apple sells. They sell 7200 RPM 2tb HDDs for $300! $300! You can buy the same high spec drives for $130 from most places. Their machine costs are insane. An ATi 5770 GPU costs $160 the apple equivalent costs $250. Which is about the only component with a reasonable price. Base dual CPU systems are starting at $4199. I can buy dual 6-core Xeons for $2200. I got my Mac Pro at a firesale deal. Apple do NOT release cpu firmware updates. A 2009 Mac Pro can be BIOS flashed into a 2010 Mac Pro and will take the ram/cpu upgrade, the motherboards are identical so for $4500 I can build a mac pro that would normally cost $8299 for any professional to buy. The professionals are getting ripped off blind. No dual CPU motherboard/1000 Watt power supply + case is worth $3800 to make up the difference in cost. Apple is screwing its professional user base. On the software side I am pretty content with how things are going, there is maya, photoshop etc. Final Cut Pro's rewrite was necessary and each new patch will add features to the cocoa rewrite. Apple has just released a new version of their tool without completing it, which is fine considering the massive price drop. Patching will solve Final Cut Pro X, and people are whining about a non-existent problem. FCPX is only bad for an entering professional who doesn't have the last Final Cut Pro copy before it came out.
LaTex == Typesetting system. If you want to use a "word processing" system, go ahead, but never compare it to typesetting! That goes hand in hand with LaTeX's philosophy of "what you write is what you mean". The one thing I hate most about writing a document (with WYSIWYG "word processors"), is making it look the way it needs to look (imagine trying to change the way headings, references, etc are displayed [all at once] in a "word processor" for a 200 page scientific document).
Point is, word processing != typesetting.
Apple is absolutely clueless in all things enterprise. The fact that board members prefer and get mac's for personal desktops means nothing more than they have the power to get their personal preferences paid for by the company. The idea that Apple could easily get their offerings into the IT sector is laughable at best.
From imaging new computers with a standard image (PXE, you know the standard everyone in the world except apple uses), to the lack of virtualization (what do you mean I can't load Lion onto a VM on the lab server?) to the dearth of packaging tools (platypus!!!) to a lack of more than bare minimal AD support (why am I paying tens of thousands of dollars for a third party product like Quest just to get basic policy support?) to just now getting full disk encyrption in 10.7 (what do you mean partial disk encryption isn't HIPAA approved?), a lack of supporting NTLMv2 by default (let's drop it in 10.7 and replace Samba!) and so on and on.
It's not that tools are completely lacking, in some cases alternatives exist that require you to have an entirely separate infrastructure in place just to manage your macs (netboot instead of pxe etc). Apple makes absolutely no provisions for the enterprise environment. The entire enterprise mindset for managing apple computers doesn't even exist. Until I can manage an apple computer at a cost rate anywhere near what it costs me to manage a windows computer your suggestion that the enterprise is hungry for Apple is nothing more than fan boy level delusion.
The cost of secondary infrastructure and the additional costs in cleaning up after clueless mac uses (I thought mac's couldn't get viruses!!) is something that keeps them out of the enterprise and will continue to do so until mac finally get's the enterprise culture and starts accepting industry standards widely embraced by Windows and Unix operating systems and hardware.
I am responsible for managing an enterprise environment that's 40% mac. If you don't know what your talking about and start spewing nonsense someone who does know if going to pop in and call you in it. Consider yourself called.
When an Apple breaks, do they send someone to your office to fix it?
Programmers and SE's? Apple early on pretty much stole the Linux development crowd around the OSX 10.2 days. Seems to me DarwinPorts, Fink, Terminal and Quartz-wm still exist and offer a very good environment. As far as OSX development, Developer tools are more popular than ever, approaching visual studio levels of use (though this is driven mostly by iPhone apps).
The gesture interfaces are nicer, and the full-screen mode is great when you want to work in a terminal without distractions
Yeah, even if that "distraction" happens to be a web browser on your second monitor so you can code web apps on a dual monitor setup. That "distraction" is gone now, and your second monitor now goes dark..gee how thoughtful of them. #1 reason I am not upgrading to Lion.
Reminds me what Jason Newsted said, when asked for his response to people saying Metallica had sold out: "Yeah we sold out. We sold out every arena we played for the last five years."
It's sad, but true.
Apple was the hero of the day, but now they only care about the ecstasy of gold and bleeding me dry, and nothing else matters.
Oh well, at least the memory remains.
In general, it is safe and legal to kill your children. -- POSIX Programmer's Guide
One reason is that WYSIWYG sucks up time and never quite works out while WYGIWYM is better. Plus Latex isn't that painful.
if I could come up with a 'Hackintosh' with OS X, I'd be so happy,' claims one audio professional."
Why the Hell would an audio professional complain? He has no valid grievance against Apple. Video pros, I understand their angst. But what did Apple ever do to wrong the audio pro? Mac OS X and the Mac it runs on is the least expensive and most versitile and essential tool in the audio pro's studio! Now... the audio pro might be pissy at Digidesign for one reason or another. But if they're upset about something in Logic... I suggest they try Ardour.
The Admin and the Engineer
I have to click a button in the corner or hit escape. It made it much less efficient to use
You can now swipe with four fingers on the trackpad to get in and out of dashboard, which I find means that I actually use dashboard regularly, for the first time since it was introduced.
Why did they invert the mouse?
Invert the mouse? They inverted the default scroll direction, but it's trivial to change it back by going in to system preferences.
What's the point of launchpad?
No idea. Dragged it from the dock, don't care about it. The dock or spotlight (only a command-space away) are faster ways of launching applications.
Why did they make address book and ical look like "real" items. It's ugly and requires extra clicks to add calendar entries from different calendars
I can't disagree there, but making iCal suck more isn't a new feature. With 10.5 they removed the tentative / confirmed flag in appointments, for example.
The problem is that all the good apple and next people retired
That's very true. Most of the people I respected at Apple are no longer there.
GCD (libdispatch) is awesome
It is, but it was introduced with 10.6 and is now fully supported on FreeBSD and mostly supported on Linux / Solaris. I didn't see any changes in the 10.7 documentation, but maybe they just forgot to update them.
They have added some shiny things to the Objective-C runtime (now reimplemented in GNUstep libobjc, should be in the upcoming 1.6 release), but they didn't bother documenting any of them. imp_implementationFromBlock() is great, but not mentioned anywhere in the documentation.
Another poster had a legitimate complaint about SMB support. They removed Samba, but their replacement sucks. For example, my printer can write to an SMB share - Windows or Samba - but it won't write to one that 10.7 exports, because 10.7 doesn't support the authentication mechanism that it wants to use.
The lack of Rosetta is a bit irritating too, although about the only thing I used it for was to run some old games (no more Diablo II! I bought that game for Windows and the same CD worked on MacOS 9, Mac OS X all the way from 10.0 to 10.6).
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