You can tell the Adobe UI isn't native but it's actually pretty good. In fact, I believe they had the right call since Apple frameworks are too limiting for complexe software like that and they needed the cross-platform compatibility anyway. Serif does the same with their suite of Apps and it's fine as well. Blender is custom as well...

Apple aficionados tend to get worked up about it (and I used to be this type) but they need to understand that there is always a necessary power balance to maintain, and going all-in with Apple tools is not a very good decision for a large software. They have proven time and time again that they will just mess up stuff when it suits them and companies with such big software endeavors cannot submit totally to the Apple agenda.

And even as an end user I would argue that UI uniformity is not very relevant, how the software works / what it allows is much more important. Relying too much on Apple software is also a losing strategy, as they have shown with Aperture and their office suite, they have basically rewritten from scratch every time with a newer incompatible format creating a lot of headaches and somehow managing to take years to give back functionality that existed before.

Apple focuses way too much on looks at the expense of many other properties (as they have shown again recently with the Liquid Glass) and its basically fashion at this point. And since Apple cannot cater to every single use case, plenty of devs end up having to work up a custom UI on top of their framework, so if there is a complexe use case, you might as well cut the middle man from the get go...

Full VMs make much more sense indeed, because they allow you to run fundamentally different OS while still keeping the host mostly the same. And they basically show that with the FreeBSD addition.

The syscall way is just a form of emulation that you have to contain and it becomes a pain to keep up to date. VMs will use more ressource but at least they are disposable and only require a good virtualization layer on the host.

Funnily enough, with time, Microsoft might be able to run all the OSs inside their own OS. Of course, that won't happen for something like macOS but that would be hilarious.

Exactly. Apple has always been inherently duplicitous and knows how to manage image/communicate very well. Marketing is actually one of their best products.

With all the control they have on the App Store (and they have showed they are perfectly fine using it when it suits them) arguing about privacy is pure virtue signaling when they allow Facebook and Google just fine. And most of their core services/apps could actually work mostly fine in a web browser so it's not like there would absolutely no way to use them. They could very much have strict requirement on data tracking and basically forbid any app doing it and that would actually make the "managed App Store" pretty good. But they don't, because they would lose a shit ton of money in various ways.

But Apple wants the cake and eats it too. They can't pretend to have principle and just throw them away when it hurts their profit. That's no standard at all but that's how it is. Apple makes pretty good technology but is completely full of shit and I would argue much more than the other usual suspects and that makes them the worse guy actually.

I must be dreaming. The catholic church is one of the most duplicitous and morality corrupt organisation I can think of and they manage to complain about something that is similar to what they do but in a tamer form. Because what he is basically saying is that people shouldn't lie. I wish the pope would use his moral on himself because he is basically selling lies for a living.

The problem with that argument is that people are free to choose for themselves and asking for authoritarian control of a whole system just because some people might be dumb enough to fuck up is completely crazy.

By this standard, people shouldn't be allowed to drive because sometime they fuck up by drinking and/or driving too fast.

Everybody is responsible for their own life, own choices, etc. I'm amazed that a company that is supposedly progressive liberal can get away with such bullshit.

But at the same time, I know very well the pseudo-progressives are always authoritarians who think they know better and want to impose their morals/rules on everyone, stealing agency from people while pretending to be doing good. Apple is a perfect example.

Agreed. In any way you put it, when you push the "argument" to its retranchement, it equivocates to: we should ban usage of paper/pen/printing press because those things can be used to make propaganda for other groups than the power in place.

Of course, tech makes all of this more efficient but it's not like if the government does not have access to the tool as well and it's not like if they didn't come up with yet many more creative ways to control and punish undesirable behavior.

Best (worst) case scenario it's fair game but with their control the common law-abiding man just gets fucked in the end for not much benefits (fake security yeah).

Except people usually try to find ways around moral problems. For now, the pressure isn't too big but I think at some point the buildup will be too much and the fall for Apple will be very harsh.

As far as I'm concerned Wifi is a "solution" for lazy or incompetent people outside of mobile devices (who do really need it to be useful). Network cable is cheap, crimper is cheap, creating a simple network in your house is mostly a trivial matter.

I have helped some people who had many troubles with wifi devices (particularly printers) and when then didn't want to run a cable to solve the problem forever I told them to fuck off. If there is one thing that is certain with wifi, it's that it will break at some point and randomly show poor performance/issues. Anything that doesn't have to be absolutely wireless has to be connected that way, problem solved, forever.

Clearly you havent visited Paris, especially the northern part. Tent people are everywhere and it used to be more at the periphery but nowadays even inside the city around popular metro stations, they are right there.

All this tells me that you have rose tinted glass and would rather ignore reality. Sure, there are plenty of things the EU does better than the US but I seriously doubt the bottom part of the population is living significantly better...

Yes and for things like manipulating maps/photos (zooming and scrolling around) it's quite convenient. The point is that it's stupid to not have it in laptops that cost this much money anyway. Anyone who doesn't want to use it doesn't have to and for the rest it can only allow more interaction methods.

In any case I think that the MacBook designs are stale and really stuck in the past, for now they only win because of the build quality and the silicon. But competitors are quite close, so if Apple continue with their destruction of macOS there won't many reasons to keep buying.

I wonder if Apple is already planning the switch to touchscreens. They’ll never announce it’s coming until they do it because it would damage current model sales. But they have made so many changes on macOS to bring it closer to iOS and the current version seems like it would be pretty touch friendly already. They even allow iPad apps to run on macOS now. Bringing touch to the MacBook seems perhaps not a given but a reasonable destination for all their other changes.

Yep I also think that's the plan. But I really doubt their approach is good, in my opinion it's like how they "managed" HiDPI displays implementation: take a shortcut to make it easier for them (and in some ways 3rd party devs who use their frameworks) to develop but with some intrinsic flaws that re-enforce their hardware lock in and isn't really future proof/scalable.

The point isn't to have the whole system of being able to be used with touch but to allow specific touch interactions depending on the context. It doesn't make sense to have big buttons and menus when you are going to hit them with a mouse/stylus most of the time regardless of touch interactions. This is a problem with all or nothing Apple approaches.

You can already see that with iPadOS: at first the iPad was basically a giant iPhone made mostly for content consumption and the touch only approach made sense because it was optimized to be used conveniently on a couch for relatively simple tasks. But as the hardware evolved and they added stylus support, software has gotten more complex in order to allow more advanced tasks. However, outside of purely artistic endeavor (where you use the table as a canvas to draw on) the UI who still has major focus on being touch centric stop making sense. If you are going to use it as a productivity machine, a keyboard is basically a requirement (why would you want to lose half the screen to display a virtual keyboard in the first place) and a finer pointing device (trackpad/mouse) becomes almost a necessity. At this point you end up having an overblown UI with large touch target that hinders information density/compactness even though you won't use it much that way. It makes the software not as good as it could be and forces poor use of the display space.

You end up in a weird place where the high-end iPads are completely overkill for the typical media consumption tablets were targeting but at the same time it's not a very good productivity device and not just because of the locked down nature of the OS (that only adds insult to the injury) but because it ends up being poorly optimized for that use case.

And this is what I fear they will do with MacBooks: a weird middle ground where you have to deal with the tradeoffs of both interactions methods instead of enabling touch/stylus in the specific parts where it makes sense. There is no need to have macOS fully touch compatible, only to support touch input in specific apps/use case where it makes sense. On top of that, Apple already knows how to transform a device for another use case just with software: in the 2000s they had Front Row, which allowed you to transform a regular Mac into a media center to be used with only a remote. That was just a software layer on top of the standard OS.

With the compatibility of iOS/iPadOS apps on Macs thanks to Apple Silicon, there is no real reason they couldn't just create this type of software layer that could enable fully touch centric use case on top of the regular productivity use case. And keep other parts of the system as they are just using the touch layer for the most commonly known use cases inside of apps (mostly scrolling/navigating, rough selection, etc).

But they don't want to do that because they are trying to sell hardware as much as possible, so they would rather make any given device miss a piece of the puzzle to force buying another device.

As far as I'm concerned, they could have made an iPad/MacBook hybrid for a long time now, where the display part could snap on a keyboard base and change primary interaction method accordingly. They won't because it means a single device could fulfill all the needs for most people who don't need heavy computing power.

In many ways Microsoft approach is actually better/smarter but they are being let down by inferior hardware (and to some extent the general hate on Windows, which is somewhat deserved but not as much as people make it).

To return to my parallel, at first Apple's approach with HiDPI led people to believe that they were ahead but, in the end, it was only a shortcut, requiring specific display resolution/form factor to enable proper integer scaling. It took a while for Microsoft to catch up, but now their solution is more flexible and allows for arbitrary resolutions that enables more different hardware configurations and ultimately use cases.

I feel it's the same problem. Apple is stuck in their ways and cannot let go of the touch centric approach, because this is what Steve Jobs argued for. They completely ignore that this argument was only about a mobile device that you carry in your pocket, where speed and convenience are the primary factors. And indeed, it is exactly what was needed for smartphones to be truly useful. But trying to apply this thinking blindly to every device regardless of their primary mode of use is self-defeating, yet this is what they are hell bent on doing it seems.

> As far as I'm concerned, they could have made an iPad/MacBook hybrid for a long time now, where the display part could snap on a keyboard base and change primary interaction method accordingly. They won't because it means a single device could fulfill all the needs for most people who don't need heavy computing power.

I've been an early adopter of this kind of thing (remember Asus Transformer?) and used it a lot. In my experience, the catch is that to make the screen detachable and usable on its own, it needs to contain most of the electronics and at least part of the battery, with the keyboard then becoming a dock with perhaps a battery extension. And the problem with that is that it makes the screen heavier and the keyboard lighter to the point where you can't have the screen at a comfortable angle when the whole device is on your lap (or if you can, it requires constant effort to maintain balance). It's perfectly fine if you have a desk or other such surface, but, well, it's a laptop, right?

Apple did an interesting thing with their iPad keyboard dock where instead of arranging it like a clamshell laptop, they suspend the screen above the keyboard, which allows them to move it closer to the user. I have one of those for a 14" iPad Pro. It balances better on the lap, but now you can't use it well while reclining...

That said I still think the concept could work, but it would require consciously designing around this problem. Personally I would be perfectly fine with stuffing the keyboard with more batteries as a counterweight, but I think that designers are reluctant to do this because it increases the overall weight of the device.

Anyway, on a device like that, yes, touch makes a lot of sense. On a regular laptop, IMO no (but with some exceptions; e.g. Lenovo's Yoga, and to some extent even Thinkpads because you can open them all the way to 180 degrees).

> I think that designers are reluctant to do this because it increases the overall weight of the device.

This is the SurfaceBook. The base has extra battery, extra GPU, and the hinge “unwinds” to extend the base a bit to help with balance.

Nice concept but it definitely makes it heavier. I’m not really sure the market for this kind of device is very large. But then I feel the same way about 13” tablets and Apple sells enough of those to justify keeping them in the lineup so what do I know.

Yep. My brother actually has a Surface Book. It's a pretty cool device but severely let down by the hardware. The separation of the GPU is actually a problem and not something I find worthwhile but they didn't have a choice to enable good performance. But it's actually not relevant today, at least for Apple. They have a perfectly fine chip that they put in their Pro iPad that is good enough for most tasks with quite good performance. No separation needed.

The Surface Book is a 9 years old device at this point. I think it's the Microsoft curse, they have a good idea but launch it half-baked and lose interest. They didn't control the most important piece of the stack anyway: the silicon. Nowadays with the Snapdragon chips they would have a chance at making something much better, but they failed too early, made a weird compromise with the Surface Laptop Studio (wasn't too bad but too expensive for the compromises) and then gave up. They focus on the Surface Pro which isn't too bad because unlike Apple they actually allow a full fat OS to run and it's not a very good tablet (at least in the media consumption sense) but it makes for a pretty decent laptop.

Of course, you have to deal with Windows and it's not as efficient as an iPad would be.

For the 13" tablet market the appeal is really easy: it can be a notepad that you draw on, you can annote document directly, write equation/diagrams/whatever with the stylus and at the same time it can be a laptop by just snapping a keyboard base to it. The major problem is the software: ideally you want to be able to use "full-fat computer OS" software when bolted on to the keyboard but at the same time enable touch centric usage when used as a notepad/tablet.

Apple could very much do it: they already enable running iPad apps on macOS, they would just need to figure out a layer on top of macOS that would enable usage of touch for the relevant apps without needing to convert the full OS to be touch ready. Just like they did back in the days with Front Row, to enable media center usage out of a regular Mac.

I'm pretty sure they already know how to solve most of the problems (maybe they even have prototypes) but I believe they won't because it is not in their interest profit wise.

Yes I agree about the engineering tradeoffs that require but the point is, as you hint, that they are actually already there and it's mostly a business decision.

I have tried the iPad Pro dock solution and it's exactly what motivates my argument. The floating aspect is largely pointless and mostly serve as a look thing (if anything it makes it more tiring to raise your hand to use touch) while having stability compromises, and not providing enough advantages (they just added a port, the trackpad is small but at least the keyboard is better now). I don't think the weight argument is very relevant since the combo already weighs more than a MacBook Air. The point is to make it a more complete professional device, something has to give, MacBook Pros are heavier and people deal with it. To keep weight down they have the Air line, this is what it should be for, not selling re-heated designs at a discount (but of course the bean counter will disagree with that).

They could make a much beefier base, with more ports and actually invest some engineering into figuring out a great hinge mechanism that the iPad part could lock into. They wouldn't need to rework a lot of the iPad parts and with their current chips you could get double battery life for what would be a very modular powerful device. Apple used to be able to do that, I don't know if you have ever dismantled a "Sunflower" iMac but I can tell you it was great engineering. I wish they would work their ass off to deliver something "magical" like that.

But they won't because they know very well that many pros already get by just fine with a MacBook Air but they need to buy an iPad on top of that if they want stylus/touch functionality. You can infer that because the iPad Pro uses the same exact chip as the MacBook Air and the device drivers must be extremely similar outside of touch/stylus and camera. If they wanted, they could at least allow dual boot macOS/iPadOS with not much work at all. The touch target is a poor argument since it would work just fine with the stylus and using Wacom displays with a Mac has been a thing since quite a while now.

It's purely commercial greed that motivates their behavior and it's the real reason they don't even try to make a device like that. One could argue that it's too niche, but that would be quite an argument, considering Apple just dumped billions of dollars in a Vision Pro, that ironically lacked vision and is the exact definition of niche. The problem with VR headset was never a technology quality problem in the first place but the fact that it doesn't really enable any kind of usage that goes past the cool demo to make up for the massive tradeoffs in useability/convenience.

So, you have Apple dumping billions into a stupid "me too" product while purposefully ignoring a potentially innovative device because they are afraid that they would lose money. I doubt we would get the iPhone today if Apple got as successful as it is with just Macs/iPods.

I haven't used an Asus Transformer but I have used a Surface Pro and my brother has a Surface Book. The potential is there but they are clearly let down by the comparatively much worse hardware. And that's the point, for anyone else than Apple this type of device is very hard (especially since their volumes are much worse) but if there is one company that has every building block that could make this go from very cool concept to absolutely amazing it's them.

And yes, I agree that on a regular laptop having touch is not that important, you need to enable the tablet/flat notepad use cases to make it worthwhile which is exactly why 180/360 laptops with special hinges are still a decent target. But Apple could do it all.