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I wanted to write a bit more about the future of “pros” on the Mac, but about the Mac Pro. Pros are the most easily spooked, jittery segment of the computer market, and they have reason to be. When they buy equipment from a vendor, whether that is Apple or HP or Dell or whoever, they are spending a substantial amount of money, and are risking their business on a platform. Buying the wrong equipment or buying into the...

One of the counter points to criticism of the Macbook Pro event is that expectations are too high. Users are expecting that a laptop should be just as powerful as a desktop, and that’s unreasonable. Generally, I agree. The Macbook Pro has not really been a good desktop replacement since almost the Powerbook G3. But the problem is Apple themselves is marketing the Macbook Pro as a desktop replacement. I mentioned in the previous post that...

I’m very supportive of going all in on Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 is a huge advance, and I think it’s worth ditching all the legacy connectors. It will be a bumpy transition at first, but once it’s done having one universal connection will be worth it (although I’m not holding my breath for corporate projectors to start adopting USB-C or Thunderbolt 3.) AMD and Nvidia have been working hard on shrinking the size of their chips, and...

I’ve been working on an app intended for use with the Apple Pencil, so I went to the store and picked up an iPad Pro this morning. (Sadly no Apple Pencil or Keyboard, both are deeply backlogged it seems.) At my desk I have a Mac Pro, I carry a Macbook Pro for working on the go, and I have an iPhone 6 Plus and iPad Air 2, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how...

I’m just finishing up my first app store bound project that was written in Swift. It’s nothing hugely exciting, just a giant calculator sort of application. Why I chose Swift is that Swift’s static typing really made me think about the data layer, and how data flows through the application. What I missed terribly was KVO/KVC, and I’m not alone. Brent Simmons has also mentioned this, but as someone who’s used a lot of KVO and...

My initial takes on WWDC announcements…

At work, we support a lot of platforms. We support iOS and Android, Windows, Linux, supermarket checkout scanners, Raspberry Pis, old Windows CE devices, and more. And all the devices run our same (large) core code, and all that code is written in C++. I’m not the biggest fan of C++. But there’s no doubt when we need to write something that works across a range of platforms, it’s a rich, commonly understood tool. It’s also...

As WWDC fast approaches, and rumors of the next OS X update focusing on polish persist, I thought I’d go over my wish list for what I’d like to see Apple address. Vulkan/Enhanced Graphics Support The graphics situation on OS X is bad. 3D graphics on OS X have been rocky from the beginning (the first ever public OpenGL demo on OS X, which sadly I cannot find video of), but Apple in the past was willing...

I’ve been looking at replacing my 2008 Mac Pro, and as much as I’d like to replace it with a new Mac Pro, the Mac Pro just looks so odd when you compare it to both Windows products and other Macs. The most visible missing feature that has been widely commented on is the lack of an Apple 5k display. I don’t really want to buy a Mac Pro at the present time because I’m pretty sure it’s...

In the debate on Apple quality, OS X Snow Leopard is usually cited as the high mark in recent OS X quality. Whether or not you believe that Snow Leopard had less bugs than any other release (which I tend to), another thing has changed since Snow Leopard is how Apple distributes Mac OS X.