Apple computer despite is meteoric rise to mainstream personal computing has come down a notch with the introduction of Sierra MacOS. In the past there used to a joke among computer science majors and engineers that used a lot of command line resources, “how do you turn a personal computer into a brick? load windows…”. The joke further goes on to say, “How do you gain value from more hardware? Run Linux”.
So here’s the problem. My apple computer now has MacOS Sierra. Sierra has been said to work best on new hardware. New hardware means both SSD and or MLC storage with a minimum processor like a i5. All this is fine and good but here is where the tires hit the road. The added indexing will timeout if you have an old platter drive, iCloud will force you to put all your files in the cloud and take a million years to get them there. It will fill your allocation of iCloud space well before they are all there and you’ll visit your Documents folder to find it empty after you shut the freaking iCloud off because it was causing your Apple to come to a grinding halt.
The final analysis:
Tim Cook and Apple is on the way to a new place in the home and on the desktop. If you remember the Lisa, well it’s like that. Their vision is fragmented much like a broken mirror and control over quality and superior user experience has given way to chasing mobile dominance. To be clear, their desktop business and its consumer loyalty is what brought Apple to it’s current place in consumer hands.
You could invest in Apple’s new hardware or you could instead go out and get a new AMD Ryzen at half the cost of an Intel i7 and run Windows 10 on an SSD at 1/2 the cost of a new Apple computer and potentially be 100% more satisfied and more productive.
Apple is the new Microsoft where Microsoft has become the new Apple. Amazing…