[OT] Windows dying

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 7 November 2017 at 07:57:11 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> Sure, they took existing IDEs and refocused them towards 
>> mobile development.  XCode better be focused on iOS, as that's 
>> pretty much all that devs are using it for these days.
>
> iOS has always been mostly a subset of OS-X. There are some 
> differences in the UI components, but the general architecture 
> is the same.

One is a touch-first mobile OS that heavily restricts what you 
can do in the background and didn't even have a file manager 
until this year, while the other is a classic desktop OS, so 
there are significant differences.

> I'm not sure why you claim that people aren't writing for OS-X. 
> Just because the iOS space is flooded with simple software does 
> not mean that people don't write complicated applications for 
> OS-X.
>
> E.g. there are lots of simple audio applications for iOS, but 
> the complicated ones are on OS-X.

I never said they don't write apps for macOS, I said iOS is a 
much bigger market which many more write for.

>> with legacy calculations, but they're probably still making 
>> good money off Macs, but it just distracts and keeps good 
>> Apple devs off the real cash cow, iPhone.  Even if the Mac 
>> financials aren't _that_ great anymore, you don't necessarily 
>> want to piss off your oldest and most loyal customers, who may 
>> stop buying iPhones and iPads too.
>
> I don't know if I trust the current management in Apple, they 
> seem to be too hung up on fashion and squeezing the market, but 
> fashions change and fashion items are relatively quickly 
> commoditised. It is slightly slower in this space because the 
> upfront investments are high, but it is easier than in the CPU 
> market where you have some objective measures for performance.

They have been selling the most popular expensive "fashion item" 
in the world for a decade now.  And according to objective 
benchmarks, their hardware blows away everybody else in mobile, 
so they have that going for them too.

> This dynamic used to be the case with cell phones too, but 
> eventually Nokia lost that market. Similarly, this dynamic used 
> to be the case with Apple's MacIntosh line. They approached it 
> as a fashion item and they almost folded over it.

The same may happen to the iPhone some day, but it shows no signs 
of letting up.

> One reason that Apple could price up their iOS products was 
> that people could justify buying a more expensive phone/tablet 
> since they also replaced their digital camera with it, then the 
> video camera.
>
> You have to view their push of iPad Pro in the same vein, it is 
> a product that cannot be commoditised yet and they try to 
> defend the price by convincing people to think of it as a 
> laptop.

Since they still have a ways to go to make the cameras or 
laptop-functionality as good as the standalone products they 
replaced, it would appear they can still convince their herd to 
stay on the upgrade cycle.

> It would be a bad idea for Apple to ditch the Mac. It is a 
> product that is much more difficult to commoditise than the iOS 
> products. And their owners tend to have multiple Apple devices, 
> so it does not take away from the iOS sales, it comes in 
> addition.

While I disagree that you can't commoditize the Mac, as you could 
just bundle most of the needed functionality into an iPhone, I 
already said that Mac users probably buy iPhones and that Apple's 
unlikely to kill off the Mac anytime soon, though they've already 
significantly cut the team working on it.

> The performance of mobile devices will always be limited by 
> heat. The reason mobile devices perform well is that a lot of 
> effort has been put into making good use of the GPU.

Even within that lower power budget, performance is now so good 
that it rivals laptop CPUs, which is what goes into most PCs sold 
nowadays, so heat and the GPU are not that much of a concern 
anymore.

> The reason that desktops are not improving much is probably 
> because AMD has not been able to keep up with Intel, but Intel 
> is now on the market with i9, so maybe they are feeling 
> threatened by Ryzen.

No, the reason they don't improve is consumers don't need the 
performance.

>> Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic,
>
> If you are talking about devices, then this is completely 
> false. "mobile" was big before iOS. The academic circles was 
> flooded by "mobile this - mobile that" around year 2000, by 
> 2005 the big thing was AR which only now is gradually becoming 
> available. (And VR peaked around 1995, and is slowly becoming 
> available now).

You are conflating two different things, fashionable academic 
topics and industry projections for actual production, which is 
what I was talking about.  I agree that a lot of people were 
talking about mobile being potentially next for awhile, Microsoft 
even came out with their UMPC platform years before the iPhone:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC

But if you looked at the chart I linked earlier, where mobile 
sales jumped 25X in a decade, that is extremely difficult to 
predict, as it was driven by a host of mobile CPU, display, 
3G/4G, and power improvements that nobody saw happening so fast.

Fashionable tech topics are mostly irrelevant, I'm talking about 
actual sales projections, especially when you're so confident in 
them that you bet your company on them.  Nobody other than Apple 
did that, which is why they're still reaping the rewards today.

> What was unexpected is that Apple and Samsung managed to hold 
> onto such a large segment for so many years. I think Android's 
> initial application inefficiency (Java) has a lot to do with 
> it. Apple chose to limit the hardware to a very narrow 
> architecture and got more performance from that hardware by 
> going binary. That was a gamble too, but they were big enough 
> to take control over it by building their own CPUs.

Those two companies still have the best hardware and the 
multi-billion-dollar marketing budgets to make sure you know it, 
;) no doubt that helps them maintain their share.