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from the have-you-tried-programming-on-a-tablet? dept.
Christopher Mims writes at the WSJ that Apple like all ambitious companies occasionally strays from its focus. According to Mims the iPhone is just coming into its prime, the iPad is an immature platform and the iWatch is in its infancy, yet Apple continues to invest in one-of-a-kind feats of engineering like the Mac Pro, which ships in volumes that are a rounding error on pretty much everything else Apple makes. "Something's got to give," writes Mims. "Showpieces like iMacs with screens that have more pixels than any PC ever (and four times the average selling price of a PC) are impressive, but what is Apple trying to prove? Is it really a good idea for Apple to continue to put resources against being king of a last-century technology?"
According to Mims the world's best tech companies can be the best at two things at once, maybe three and even a company as mighty as Apple gets to be the best at only a handful of things. "In a world in which the cloud is increasingly the hub of everything individuals and businesses do, and our mobile devices its primary avatar, what on Earth is Apple doing running victory laps around a dying PC industry? Personally, I'd rather see Apple push the envelope on what's next."
takyon: Paywall buster.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Informative) by RobotMonster on Wednesday July 01 2015, @03:42PM
I have a 5 year old twin-Xeon Mac pro (with the tower form-factor instead of the dustbin).
I paid a lot for it, but an equivalent Windows machine would have cost similar.
It has easily paid for itself in reduced compile times and general lack of hassle.
It still kicks arse, despite being 5 years old -- I can still get into the top-ten list for individual machines contributing to SETI without dedicating 100% of its processing power...
I have had zero problems with it. It's very quiet - the last desktop Windows machine I had (with considerably less grunt) sounded like an F16 taking off every time you did a compile.
OSX is far from perfect, but it's a lot closer to something sensible than Windows has ever been.
Unfortunately I develop software for Windows. Running Windows inside a VM's window is the only way to run Windows. When it goes into an update-reboot-frenzy, I can catch up on email and soylent...
I recently bought a new Retina MacBookPro. It too, is quite a nice piece of hardware. Well made, quiet and fast (though not faster at compiles as my 5-year-old-monster).
I've bought high-end windows laptops in the past, and they never delivered on the promises they made. Super loud. No battery life. And Windows. Ugh!
Hilariously, one activity that is guaranteed to activate the fans in my new MacBookPro is running *windows update*.
I'm just hoping that Apple fix their dustbin design before my current tower is cost-effective to replace. AC power cable right next to the headphone plug? No extra internal storage? Come on!
Unlike Christopher Mims, I actually use my computer for computing...