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Regarding the swollen battery, if it's a Lithium battery it sounds like it may be close to failing. If I were you I would stop using that laptop right away.

I learned during my time at an RC airplane co. that lithium batteries can be very dangerous: they will actually explode in some cases.

Anyway, a stranger's $0.02. Good luck!

I've seen enough YouTube videos of battery fires that those things freak me out. It's like having a stick of dynamite laying around with a smoldering fuse.

A battery "swollen up to a point where I can't even close the laptop" is a serious fire/explosion hazard.

You should remove it from your laptop and safely dispose of it as soon as possible.

It does NOT go into regular garbage or recycle. Call your local recycle center (or the non-emergency number of your fire deptartment) to ask how your city handles laptop batteries.

Lowes and Home Depot will both take batteries for recycling.

The biggest thing for me is speed. I don't know who Apple thinks it's fooling with their slow ass animations. Windows 10 is way snappier.

And I think the OS X windowing/dock system is inferior. It's way harder than it should be to find windows.

I hate the Mac windowing system. I like most other aspects of the Mac though.

> Also the battery has swollen up to a point where I can't even close the laptop.

You can get a replacement battery from Apple for pretty reasonable pricing (https://support.apple.com/mac-notebooks/repair/service/prici...).

You really don't want a bulging Macbook battery lying around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNJXqy6bWow

Maybe Apple has stopped innovating, but Windows is just not there for developers, not even close to what Mac has been ~3 years ago.

Saying this from recent personal experience.

Could you expound on that? What's missing, besides a bash shell?

Win 10 has bash shell and full Ubuntu apt-get now

That's really not that good. It's a nearly completely isolated and the terminal app is extremely lacking compared to both linux and iTerm2. Also in my short time using it a BUNCH of standard packages, like spacemacs for example, didn't work at all correctly or couldn't be installed.

Win 10 can run ELF binaries now. That doesn't make it an integrated *nix like system (sadly!).

There are no good options these days. I know that's been the song of developers since the beginning of software, but it does seem we've hit a bit of a valley in terms of desktop OS's. Linux still can't quite get its foot in the door. OS X peaked with 10.6.4. Windows peaked with 7. Everything since has been the long, slow decline of trying to mimic mobile's success and failing.

Wholeheartedly agree.

I want Windows 10s graphics performance, Linux' kernel/CLI tools/open source mindset and OS X' graphical applications/UI design/integration with my my other devices.

Currently using OS X, but the hardware situation is frustrating (has always been, but currently at it's worst since ~10 years), the software quality is declining and Apple's ongoing direction towards iOS doesn't fit me.

Using Linux on my PC is frustrating, the graphics situation is terrible. All I want is 60 fps vsync'd performance, fluid scrolling, no choppiness when moving or resizing windows. Also, there is still a lack of many important applications (Adobe, MS Office). The whole Gtk vs. Qt situation also aggravates this.

Windows, for me, as a developer, is a total disaster, not only does it differ totally from my usual UNIX environment with it's completely different way of handling files and directories, but I also dislike the software: font rendering is terrible (in my eyes), the switch to UWP is terrible, as is the platform (UWP) itself, to me, the lack of choice is even worse than on OS X. But Windows seems to be the only OS at the moment to run without major problems on hardware of my choice with good graphics performance.

I really wished Linux would get it's graphics stack straight. I know it's not the individual developer's fault (and most certainly, the NVIDIA/AMD didn't help much in the past), but the current situation is still somewhat subpar. Still, the choices at the moment all frustrate me, so I stick to what I have.

What GPU do you have, and which driver stack do you use?

The machine on which I installed Linux had a Core i7 4770, so it came with an Intel HD 4600. This chip did well, but of course the performance is not enough, so I installed my GTX 770. The proprietary driver made many problems, reported wrong refresh rates (Compiz never got above 30 fps, unless I manually told it the refresh rate, which breaks my multi monitor setup). I tried mutter (Gnome 3), Compton and Compiz, but none of them could easily deliver sane, smooth 60 fps using vsync.

Kwin from KDE actually managed that, but the performance was very bad, whenever I started playing a YouTube video for example, scrolling got choppy and to a maximum of 30 fps.

I will say this: Visual Studio is pretty great. This is from someone who started out on the command line and swears by Unix / Vim.

>As I am typing this on my macbook air, I have to take my hands off the keyboard time to time because it gets too hot.

For over 5 Apple laptops of various kinds, I've never seen that, with heavy programming/VM use, or DAW and NLE use. A little warmer yes. Ouch, my hands hurt? No. Does that really happen, and can we have some actual temperature measurements, or is it just that some people are too sensitive?

>Also the battery has swollen up to a point where I can't even close the laptop.

That, on the other hand, I had happen. The battery needs to be replaced, and it can even be dangerous.

>All they released was some minor upgrades and a "macbook" which I didn't buy because I know better than to act as Apple's guinea pig and buy their first iteration of anything--I learned it the hard way with my iPhones and iPads.

Those are probably the worst examples to cite, as the original iPhone and iPad were mighty fine. It's mostly with 1st generations of Mac redesigns that things sometimes get bad for some production runs (faults found in new materials/suppliers/designs etc).

>Anyway, all this to me feels like it's because Apple is no more an innovator company, instead they follow the stock market.

Compared to which company that is? Because I mostly see either PR projects (like Google glass) or failed semi-copies (Surface capped to 1M unit sales etc).

So while new and exhiting things might have slowed down at Apple (though I remember in Jobs times that we waited for 5 years of iterations to get color and wifi on our iPods and people cheered for any minor incremental update as if it was golden) I just don't see anyone in the PC land doing anything worth my while.

> For over 5 Apple laptops of various kinds, I've never seen that, with heavy programming/VM use, or DAW and NLE use. A little warmer yes. Ouch, my hands hurt? No. Does that really happen, and can we have some actual temperature measurements, or is it just that some people are too sensitive?

Yes it does happen. I have had two macbook pros, two macbook airs. It happened to every single one of them when it was time for their death. Maybe you've been switching your macbooks before something like that happened. It's not like I get a serious burn but it sure is very irritating and even hurts if I keep it there for too long.

> Those are probably the worst examples to cite, as the original iPhone and iPad were mighty fine. It's mostly with 1st generations of Mac redesigns that things sometimes get bad for some production runs (faults found in new materials/suppliers/designs etc).

I bought the first iPad, and it was super heavy. They came out with a lighter iPad soon after. In my opinion the best timing to buy any Apple product is their second iteration. The second version is always significantly better than the first one and then the perceived variance is not as severe afterwards.

> Compared to which company that is? Because I mostly see either PR projects (like Google glass) or failed semi-copies (Surface capped to 1M unit sales etc).

I'm comparing it to Apple itself. Comparing to other companies has no meaning. Just because other companies are not being innovative doesn't make Apple an innovative company, has nothing to do with each other.

>I bought the first iPad, and it was super heavy. They came out with a lighter iPad soon after.

Well, I had the first iPad, and have been using it for a god 4-5 years until I got an iPad 4. It being heavy is just what the technology afforded at the time, not some unique case of making the customer a guinea pig.

>* I'm comparing it to Apple itself. Comparing to other companies has no meaning. Just because other companies are not being innovative doesn't make Apple an innovative company, has nothing to do with each other.*

Innovative (which I dislike as a word in general for this use, as people conflate it with anything, from primary physics research to new case designs) is relative.

Some company is innovative because others make less new things. If HP for example produced marvels of novel technology year after year since 1999, then we wouldn't call Apple or anyone else innovative with the "mere updates" they've put out (in comparison).

My Macbook Pro 17in got so hot I ended up buying an external keyboard. No actual temperature measurements because it was a work machine I gladly gave back, but given that people often tell me I have "asbestos fingers" I'm certainly not too sensitive.

First iPad (I still have one) became a paperweight pretty fast, partly due to the small amount of RAM, but also because the last version of iOS that runs on it has a seriously buggy version of Safari. It will suddenly quit in something JavaScript-related, I know not what. Reasonably well attested on various support forums.

I still swear by my Mac desktops - the mini is a marvel - and would be wary of drawing any greater narrative, but I've certainly had some duds recently.

The stagnation of progress in computing power is going to commoditize operating systems and software in general, so if you stick with Apple for another few years then the costs of switching away will probably be lower.

You could check out JetBrains AppCode[1], depending on how you're building. It still uses Xcode for the Interface Builder and Storyboard tools but you might be able to offload much of the process to AppCode. We've experimented with doing it, but I don't believe anyone has actually made the switch full time yet.

[1] https://www.jetbrains.com/objc/

My point was I would like to switch to Windows if I had the choice. This doesn't look like it's solving my problem. You still need to use mac.

Interesting; my own experience has been rather the opposite:

Windows -> Linux -> Mac

I got a Mac Mini to do some iOS work, and it rapidly became my primary workstation. Now my main laptop is a Macbook Air.

It's outstanding hardware and software. Windows 7 is slick, but Apple just works, and I can focus more on my work and less on searching for menu items etc.

It's not the opposite.

I came from Windows to Mac too. And my point was I would like to go back to Windows only if I could.

I do not think apple products suck. I just dislike the increasingly lack of choice since they're now following Wall Street and trying to move away from desktop and into a "growth market".

I would have been much more forgiving if the things they shipped instead of mac were good. I was honestly ready to buy them all. They were not. I don't care about some niche high end laptop-wannabe tablet (iPad pro), and I don't care about some watch they desperately want to turn into a platform just like iPhone but won't ever happen.

I think the reason people like me complain nowadays is because Apple is making too many decisions that they would have never made before, and it feels like all those bad decisions come from wanting to keep growing for the sake of growing instead of thinking from customer's point of view.

I moved from Windows to Mac because I can actually afford it, and honestly I'd really prefer not to go back. I don't get the love for Windows that some Mac/Linux devs have.

My two cents: I have used an Apple Watch every day for the past year, and I love it.

As others have mentioned, the swelling battery is a fire risk. I had the same issue for a macbook some years ago and the Apple store replaced it for free. I can't recall whether I had AppleCare at the time, but the macbook wasn't purchased via Apple. So it likely didn't.

I don't think you'll find a way to seamlessly build native iOS apps from Windows. Visual Studio has a great development environment for iOS apps but the compilation still has to happen on a Mac. It's more difficult for developers, but Apple tightly controls their entire stack.

And for all of you on the thread who say Windows is a disaster for developers, I'd love to chat with you. I'm the guy for the MSVC C++ front end and code analysis. Either PM me or mail me: my work address is apardoe at youknowthecompany.com

> but Apple tightly controls their entire stack

More like Apple wants you to use their computers. If it was legal I'm sure Microsoft would have figured out how to compiler iOS apps in Visual Studio. It's not magic, it's just obscured and prevented through legalese.

I can either be charitable or accusatory :) It's not so obscure as to how one might run Xcode tools on another Unix-like OS. It's just illegal. Apple tightly controls their entire stack.

MacBook Air was designed for portability. Heat and CPU throttling mean it's not really suitable for use as a workhorse....

And, of course, if you really want a serious, long-lasting workhorse, then you want a proper tower desktop. Apple used to make good ones ;-)

Wow, I am the opposite. Have to move to windows every now and again to develop (Damn you Xamarin and SOE), and I hate every minute of it. Everything is harder, the hardware is crap, it seems slow and buggy.

I much prefer xcode on Apple.