This might possibly be the most clueless comment I've seen on MR in quite some time. He'll most likely be making even more money off apple now that he's able to charge consulting fees. It's obvious you didn't read past the first line of the article.
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Apple's Longtime Design Chief Jony Ive Leaving to Start New Design Company With Apple as a Primary Client
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This might possibly be the most clueless comment I've seen on MR in quite some time. He'll most likely be making even more money off apple now that he's able to charge consulting fees. It's obvious you didn't read past the first line of the article.
It will be interesting to see what he works on in the future, especially in his new relationship with Apple. There is a part of me that is concerned with this since I've always liked his design choices. It will be difficult to judge how soon we will see the results of this if we see it at all. I have no doubt people will either use this as an excuse to say that Apple has gotten better or worse in the future or both from various different people.
I’m looking forward to see Ive share his genius with other companies, maybe we’ll finally get the television set that the bean counters at Apple wouldn’t put into production.
Since Apple is his first client it seems that he wants to do more pure design work and leave the other corporate BS behind. This can allow him to do this.
It makes sense when Jeff Williams is obviously being prepared for the CEO role. I imagine that Cook will step down after 10 years or so (ie 2021) to become the chairman of Apple.
Stockholders probably appreciate that they made it clear that Apple will be one of the “primary clients” of Jony’s new company.
I suspect Apple will be paying his firm lots of money for him to exclusively consult for Apple on the design of smartphones, tablets, watches, glasses and cars if only to stop him working for the competition.
I think Gruber’s concern that Apple isn’t replacing Jon Ive stands though. Their design is fundamentally, critically central to their value as a brand.
Agreed. But what if Jeff Williams is going to be responsible for spearheading the AVR glasses and car (as he’s done with the Watch)? Then it means that the design team reports to the most important person in the company as Cook starts to lean into a chairperson role.
And there’s a very interesting article in The Verge that points out that the Apple of the next decade will likely be (deliberately) drained of ‘mythic heroes’. Think of Apple as moving to a collective of warrior monks more than a cult of personality, reliant on a few key heroes.
Designed by Ive and Licensed to Apple in California. Made in China.
Now hopefully Timmy is next.
i knew it was something in the bush, since he did't made those classic ads about the new, redesign..blabla videos at the appleevents.
wrong guy went - TC should have leaving
wrong guy went - TC should have leaving
Actually, I haven't liked the designs for several years.
I feel like ever since we roasted Jony on his redesign and vision of iOS 7, he just wasn't the same anymore. Just sayin.
Some interesting ideas. The Verge is one of the last places I’d look for insights on Apple’s plans though. They’re outsiders just like all the other click bait tech sites. Probably better insights in here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/c6avjy/jony_ive_iphone_designer_announces_apple_departure/
I'll try to keep this from being a 20 page essay, but no promises
. I respect your question, so I want to give you a thorough answer because the subject is complicated and I didn't come to my decision on a whim.I guess I'll start by explaining why I, and most sensible people, resisted using Linux prior to a few years ago. Then I'll explain why I'm going with Linux rather than Windows when I'm abandoning Apple (although, if good things happen as a result of the news in the first post of this thread, Apple may still win me back).
So for years, I mocked Linux. Okay, not really mocked. I've always been very interested in computers, very comfortable with computers, and I was never the sort of person to begrudge somebody else for choosing an alternate operating system like Linux, BeOS, or some flavor of Unix. Honestly, I thought it was very cool. I just had a very long list of reasons why it wasn't very good for the vast majority of users, which included myself. I couldn't help but view (even though I'm a massive nerd myself) the people running Linux desktops as being nerdy just for the sake of being nerds. In other words, the choice of Linux was ideological, not practical, and said more about what they were rejecting out of Apple and Microsoft than what they were embracing. There are still plenty of ideological nut jobs using Linux today on their desktops, but the argument that Linux is not practical is simply no longer the truth.
~~~
So what were my arguments why Linux wasn't practical?
Argument #1: Linux is too difficult to use, I just want something that works.
The first computer my family owned had no GUI at all. Heck, the first computer I was exposed to in elementary school had no GUI at all. I started programming when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, was fluent in 5 computer languages by the time I graduated from high school, and knew enough to get by in maybe half a dozen others. I went to a tech school to learn computer science in college (didn't make it a career, but that's another essay for another time). I was a guy who put Terminal in his dock the day he first installed Mac OS X back in 2003, and it's been there ever since. A command line interface doesn't scare me, but that doesn't mean I don't want a mouse and an intuitive GUI to do a lot of tasks. I don't want an operating system that requires a lot of constant tweaking or fixing. Mostly, I just want something I can set up quickly, then it just works, and then I want to forget I'm even using an operating system. It should just get out of my way, and I shouldn't have to think about it again.
While it's true if you sit a typical Windows or Mac user in front of a fresh install of Arch Linux or something, they're going to be totally lost, there are now dozens, realistically hundreds, of Linux distros that are very easy and intuitive to use. They are no harder to use than Windows or the Mac. They get out of your way, just as a Mac does. On many of them, you can fire up what is basically an App Store (except everything's free) point your mouse at what you want to install, click a button, and it just installs. Then you can press a button, click an icon, and open the app. Put your favorite apps on a thing that's basically a dock. If you want to change your sound output, or change the desktop picture, you just click on the settings app, and adjust your settings to your heart's content in a friendly, intuitive GUI interface. Is there some new updates for your OS or software? A notification will pop up and you can do a one-click install of those updates. I would say for 99.9% of the typical use cases both for home and business use, Linux is as easy as point-and-click, and the interfaces have become very clean, intuitive, and beautiful. That's assuming you use one of the more popular Linux distros. If you do want something more complicated to use, you have that option as well. I would say for the average Windows or Mac user, if you handed them a USB install stick for one of the more popular Linux distros, a computer with a blank hard drive, and gave them absolutely no instruction whatsoever, they would be up and running and doing everything they normally do on their computer within the hour.
Argument #2: Linux has no drivers, no support, no software.
That was certainly true, once upon a time. That was also true once upon a time for Windows and Mac. The thing about software is it builds on top of the software that came before it. If you go way down, you have machine code that translates to 1s and 0s. Then somebody made a compiler that lets another programmer use a slightly easier language to make a few low level interfaces that lets another programmer build a library that lets another programmer build some other libraries that lets another programmer write the software letting you view this text sitting on an internet database somewhere. Linux has been around for a very long time now, and over time it has attracted more and more people to the platform, who have contributed more and more code to solve more and more problems. This has made Linux more accessible, and thus more popular, attracting more and more people to the platform, who have contributed more and more code to solve more and more problems.
Big companies have noticed. Whether they are seeking for business reasons to hedge their bets or get away from monopolistic practices by Microsoft and other big companies, some big players have gotten involved in Linux. Nvidia now releases proprietary drivers for Linux with about as much frequency as they release new drivers for Windows, and there are good open-source drivers for Nvidia cards as well. AMD GPU support on Linux is also quite good. CUDA and Vulkan? Linux has those. Valve has their own Linux distro now, SteamOS, and they are actively contributing to making games run just as well on Linux as they do anywhere else. It should go without saying that Google is heavily involved in Linux in the server and mobile markets, but things are continuing in those areas. Google's new Stadia cloud gaming service is running on Linux. Printer drivers? Yes, Linux even has those too. Microsoft has contributed to Linux in the past, but now ships Windows 10 with a compatibility layer for Linux called Windows Subsystem for Linux that is a checkbox and restart away from being able to run Linux binaries on Windows computers. Even if that sounds like Microsoft is just trying to get Linux people to use Windows, the result of these sorts of projects is that more people will be exposed to Linux and Linux tools, and thus those tools will improve. Microsoft has their own Linux distro as of last year, Azure Sphere, which is an ARM-based, Linux kernel for internet-of-things devices. Apple has been involved in things like WebKit and LLVM/Clang. I could go on, but you get the point.
It's not just big companies either, but education. Think of the Raspberry Pi, and the countless uses that has had in STEM education for elementary and secondary school kids. Kids are learning Linux, the way kids used to learn System 7 in their school Mac labs back in my day. A lot of schools want to get away from Microsoft licensing, and open source offers advantages to both price point and customization, while providing plenty of off-the-shelf options you can't get from a big monolithic company.
Linux these days is very mature, has a ton of people contributing (more and more every day), and there is something close to software parity with Windows and the Mac, and arguably better drivers than the Mac. If there's a task you want to do on a Linux desktop that you can do on a Windows or Mac machine, there's software for that. It may not be the same exact software (some notable companies like Adobe still haven't come over), but it'll have similar capabilities. If it doesn't have similar capabilities, it will soon. Heck, there's always WINE, which is practically point-and-click for a lot of Windows software these days. I've even seen somebody running Adobe Photoshop in WINE. Probably at a performance hit, but not a severe one, and WINE is getting better and better all the time. Of course, the more people who are satisfied using WINE, the more people who come onto the platform, and the better native support for software gets as a business decision.
Argument #3: If something breaks, you're on your own.
Once upon a time, before the internet really took off, most back-end software was not Linux, and available distros were difficult and complicated to use, this was true. That was a really long time ago, though. These days, if you want a complete solution, just pay one of the several companies that offer commercial-level support for their distributions, just as you'd pay Apple or Microsoft to set you up. If you're willing to get your hands a little dirty, and you're tinkering with the OS and something goes wrong, there are countless support forums, guides, and chat rooms to get an immediate answer to every question, and solution to nearly every problem. Linux is no longer a niche thing that only enthusiast nerds in the 90s are using. Linux is huge. I know probably about a dozen people running Linux as their main or secondary operating system these days, from all walks of life, and I am not working in computers anymore so these are not co-workers at a big tech company I'm talking about, but regular people using their computers for regular things. I was just talking to somebody the other day who was installing Linux on an old computer they had to use as a media center for their TV. Why? Because it's old hardware and they wanted something lighter weight than bloated Windows.
And frankly, I dunno about you, but when I've had a problem with any Macs or Windows computers I've ever had to use, my first call was not to Cupertino or Redmond, I did a web search.
~~~
So if Linux is about as good as Windows, why not Windows?
Privacy and Security
I care about privacy, and Windows is way, way too up in my business. All the telemetry, all the software running I don't know what it does, all the mysterious server connections, it frankly gives me the creeps. I also care about my security, and I know I'm far, far safer on Linux than I am on Windows. I know this because I've literally learned how to hack (white hat, I promise), and I simply know that Windows is less secure than Linux, by default, because of how they are designed from the ground up. Linux is also more responsive to security issues than Microsoft or Apple will ever be, by nature of how these things are organized. Linux is a very big target when it comes to servers, they are obviously dominant and thus attract more attention from malicious actors on the internet, but in terms of the consumer space, I'm very unlikely to be running software that malicious actors will bother targeting, even if vulnerabilities exist. Should a vulnerability be discovered, the patch can be on the repositories very, very quickly, because there is low organizational overhead in the open-source, distributed community. Because the community is distributed, across more than a hundred different countries, with different cultures, different legal jurisdictions, and different motivations, I don't have to invest my trust into a single entity, legal jurisdiction, or value system. If any one part of the Linux ecosystem is compromised by government fiat, or corporate greed, or a malicious actor, somebody will just make their own fork that isn't compromised, and distribute it. As people become more and more security and privacy conscious (at least I hope they do), I think Linux will only get better at this, and get better overall because it will attract more people to it to contribute. Apple has tried to use their walled garden, secure enclaves, etc. etc. to keep out malicious actors, even government actors, but ultimately one is still relying on a single entity, Apple, in the hopes that they don't do something bad, themselves. I trust Apple... to an extent. One could I say I trust Apple to be Apple, and their business model is less scary. I trust Microsoft less. Linux doesn't force me to trust any one entity, and distributes my trust across a number of opposing and far less individually powerful interests, and Linux also gives me far more ability to verify my trust. Linux also gives me far more options for just about everything. If something doesn't smell right, I have alternatives, and it's a very easy switch.
Choices
Microsoft has always restricted a lot of the user's choices. I would say these days Apple is worse, and always sort of was for hardware, but the problem with being reliant on a single monolithic corporation is always going to be the lack of choice inherent to being beholden to the whims of corporate executives, boards, and investors. I'm not anti-capitalist, quite the opposite, but I think part of being a good capitalist means having a healthy market, and a healthy market means consumer choice. There is absolutely no denying that Microsoft and Apple are both essentially monopolies. You could call them a duopoly, you could include Alphabet in the mix in various ways, or whatever, but you know what I'm talking about. If any of these companies decides one day that things will be a certain way, then things are going to be a certain way, and if you're reliant on that platform, have software lock-in, you are pretty screwed. Increasingly, I have noted Apple has made significant changes that I simply don't agree with, both on their hardware and software. It's why I've been driven away from the platform. It would be awfully silly of me to get into a relationship with another big company, such as Microsoft, when they could do the same exact sorts of things. Maybe I like some of the things they do, but if there's some other aspect that comes along with it, that I don't like, I'm stuck with that other thing if I want to upgrade. Maybe I have no choice but to upgrade. It's a very messy business, being reliant on a single company. Apple got stuck being reliant on IBM for their PPC chips. Then they got stuck being reliant on Intel, especially at the high end. Apple ultimately ended up working on their own ARM chip designs so they would have choices in the mobile space, and I know many people here (for the record, I'm not one of them) who hope Apple will make a desktop-class ARM chip for all their computers with each new Mac announcement. I think that would probably be disastrous for Apple, at least for the foreseeable future, but at least it would give them control over their own destiny. Well, as a user, I feel I should also have control over my own destiny.
Long-Term Support or Availability
Recently two companies announced that their upcoming operating systems would drop 32-bit support. Apple, and Canonical, the company that releases Ubuntu Linux. Of course, many Mac users still forced, for whatever reason, to run 32-bit software, are upset and complaining about it. Some Mac users also complained when Rosetta support was dropped (and some still do). Some Mac users also complained when Classic support was ended (and some still do). Did Apple listen, and change their minds about any of these decisions? Did Apple offer any solutions? I think we all know the answers are no, and no. So what happened in the Linux world? Well, a bunch of Linux users complained that dropping 32-bit versions of certain libraries would have a serious impact on WINE, and the ability of Linux to run Windows software. To be clear, nobody, anywhere, is under any obligation to support the running of Windows software on Linux, least of all a single company distributing a particular version of Linux, which itself has no relation to the WINE project. Nevertheless, Canonical heard the specific complaints of their users, and changed their mind. They will be not only continue to offer the necessary 32-bit packages, but also work with WINE and others to help them better migrate away from those 32-bit packages. Kudos to Canonical for admitting when they got something wrong, but more importantly than that, Canonical is not the only business in town. Anyone relying on those particular 32-bit packages could have gotten them elsewhere. Many Linux distros are not giving up 32-bit support any time soon, and have no intention to. Linux has plenty of choices, and you really can tailor your operating system to have the features and support that you need for your particular use cases. More than that, though, if Canonical, or Red Hat, or SUSE, or any of the other Linux companies were to go belly-up tomorrow, or suddenly decide they want to sell toasters instead of distribute Linux, their users are not completely and hopelessly screwed. The distributed and multifaceted Linux environment means there is long-term support for technologies and tools without a single point of failure. Many Linux distributions and packages are created and maintained by individuals with no motive aside from a passion for their particular project. They're not accountable to investors, and any person who wants to take what they've done and do another version of it, either a better version or just to keep it going after the original creators lose interest, they can do that. That makes for a very stable computing environment. You know that the software you use today, you can still use ten years from now. Maybe you won't want to, because something better will come along, but you don't have to be worried about it. Linux is so modular that you can truly take the good, without needing to take the bad, and it's free enough that you can choose what you want to use and what you don't want to.
Immediate Gratification
Well, sorta immediate. Depends on some things, including what distro you use, what repositories you use, but if you're somebody who wants the absolute latest bit of software, you can get it very quickly on Linux, instead of waiting for whatever Apple puts out once a year, or Microsoft every few years. Since there's no central organization responsible for every part of your Linux install, different groups are putting out new things all the time. Want to try that new feature in a particular desktop environment? Just install it. A new version of some computer language comes out? Just install it. You don't need to wait for some big official release, timed for whatever PR roll-out some marketing guys decided on.
*nix
This one may not matter to a lot of people, which is why it's at the end of my list, but it matters to me. I've been using some kind of Unix-like OS for the last 16 years. I know it. I understand it. I don't want to be using anything else. I've gotten too used to having a shell on Unix-like systems to ever go to Windows as my primary OS. Yeah, I know, there's PowerShell, there's Cygwin, there's a bunch of stuff, but they're not the same. I am too used to sed, and AWK, and grep and all kinds of other neat stuff, and those things work and are useful because of how *nix works.
~~~
So what about the future of Linux?
Well, I see only upsides. Take everything I've written above, and add more users; more interest from companies, governments, and schools; and add more privacy concerns as companies and governments behave more poorly and regular people start noticing more. Linux has already reached a point where almost anyone working in technology is already using it in some capacity on the job, it's now very user-friendly, and there's no sign of it ever slowing down. Will it ever truly dominate (outside of mobile/servers where it already does)? I don't know. I think it stands a much better chance of doing so than the Mac at bumping off the Windows PC. Most indie developers now develop using code that'll compile and run cross-platform, and that means Linux. Big companies are pouring a lot of money into Linux systems in applications outside of the server space, which have big benefits to the desktop market even if they're not contributing strictly to desktop-oriented projects. Kids today are growing up learning programming on Raspberry Pis running some flavor of Linux. It really is hard to imagine that Linux won't continue to improve, continue to grow, and even if it does not end up taking a huge chunk of the market in the near future, it seems certain that developers will have to deal with the fact that a large segment of their own potential customers are running Linux. The trend is towards cross-platform, open technologies as the basis for performance computing, which makes releasing software for all three platforms increasingly easy, and thus increasingly likely. Some big software companies may never make the move, but this has never been about any particular big software company. What matters is enough do, or new software companies come along and make those old companies obsolete.
I think the most likely thing to happen is that what operating system you run becomes increasingly irrelevant over the next ten years. Pretty much all the software you want to run will be running on top of open, cross-platform APIs, aside from a few basic programs that every OS has their own version of which can easily share the same filetypes between them, and if anyone comes up with a fancy new feature, it will simply be copied by the others. There will be a layer of platform-specific UI sugar on top, but essentially all the hard work will be done using the same codebase.
~~~
Hopefully there's not too many typos or half-finished sentences in this post. I spent too much time today writing it, and don't really care to read and edit it. I could have probably done a better job with paragraphs, but I'm not going to fix it. You said you were curious, and I hope you'll forgive me for satisfying your curiosity with such a long involved post.
For all the TL;DR trolls out there, this post was not for you and your comments are only a waste of your own time.
Wow!! What a terrific read. I'm sitting here at work, bored, and your essay was a really nice escape for a few minutes. Thanks for taking the time to type all of that out!
Clearly, Linux has matured so much from the point I thought it was still stuck at. That's very encouraging to hear. After reading your post, I started searching around for popular software that I either use or am considering using in the future and was surprised to find Linux support for those pieces of software. No way!
I used to not care much for open source software, but after seeing the direction of things over the past few years with tracking etc. etc., as well as the disposable nature of software and data (you talked about dropped support etc.), I'm a lot more welcoming of the idea. Thankful to hear that we have a viable option outside of the MS/Apple duopoly. I think I'll make a hard drive partition and give it a shot sometime soon for fun.
You should really save your post somewhere. It'd make for a great opinion piece or new forum post sometime.
ps - What kind of performance hit are you looking at when running programs with Wine vs running those same programs natively on Windows?
That's... dark.
I was not a fan of Ive without Steve Jobs to edit his madness, but dang, dude.
After the Realease of the macbook air 2018 “10 years old classic edition” no one could be surprise why he is leaving Apple. InOvatIOns RIP
I hope they keep with the quality of macOS over the time, hardware is not so important, I can live with plastic ugly products, but I can’t not live with windows!!! Please!!
I hope they keep with the quality of macOS over the time, hardware is not so important, I can live with plastic ugly products, but I can’t not live with windows!!! Please!!
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In his never ending quest to impose his own personal preferences on everyone and everything, Ive will be starting his own fertility clinic.
British man 'fathered 600 children' at own fertility clinic:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/91...red-600-children-at-own-fertility-clinic.html
British man 'fathered 600 children' at own fertility clinic:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/91...red-600-children-at-own-fertility-clinic.html