It looks like if I go with a new Macbook Pro for the next decade, I'm signing up to a device that will increasingly get locked down.
The direction of development appears to be iOS in a laptop form factor.
Don't get me wrong, I like having a phone, but I want a general-purpose computer too.
It's a bit sad in a way, I picked up my current machine because the sentiment at the time was that the Macbook Pro was a professional's machine and one of the groups of professional's that it would cater to was developers.
What Apple expected for that was those professionals being willing to pay at a higher price point to get that power. That expectation seems to be bearing out less and less these days.
I still want that deal. Just a little bit of shiny, but all the power that gets out of my way and I pay for it...
So I'm wondering, am I in a minority here? What do others in this ecosystem want? (and yes I'm fully aware that this ecosystem isn't very big)
Are people ok with their main dev machine being a more locked-down system? I see some people jumping into developing on iPad's in the cloud.
So I'm wondering am I the minority of a minority?
Or is there a chance that there are enough people who feel like I do that some company out there can serve our needs and make a decent bank doing it?
Or perhaps I'm mistaken =)...
If I would be about to make that choice now, I can tell you that seeing what Apple does, I wouldn't be worried. I would be terrified.
There's a well known phenomena called "vendor lock-in". Consider a consequence of teaming up with someone you don't trust. Yeah, nothing good is going to happen because of that...
Linux is great this days. Even Windows is OK-ish. Apple was a big deal in the era of Windows XP. In those days it was a huge difference. Now they IMO have nothing to offer to a tech savvy customer. There's so many reasonable options out there that only a person enslaved by Apple ecosystem for years can think that there's going to be an issue with going with anything else than Apple. Yes, I was that person too. The truth is that Apple has nothing to offer except of shiny overpriced hardware and a fairy tale about user's superiority because of "think different". Nowadays I don't even care about what Apple does. The world is a huge place and too beautiful to look at it thru the lenses of Apple's gay-ish UI ;P Not that I have anything against gays, but how am I supposed to think seriously about a company that produces its widgets for the sake of making non-tech-savvy people satisfied? Go to an Apple store and for 1 hour observe who buys their products. That was an epiphany for me when I had doubts! Clearly not (usually) people who know what they are doing...
Writing this on a Lenovo Legion Y530, a great machine 50% of the price of a new MBP. Booting Linux and Windows. I have no artificial limits enforced on me by anyone. I'm happy.
Nothing of the above is going to work for an iOS developer, etc. Those people have no choice. Ups. Who the hell puts himself in an "I have no choice" situation willingly?
They've done nothing to make the Mac more of a locked down platform or more like iOS, except for security things, and those you can disable quite easily.