Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

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Turns out I'll be the contrarian voice in an overwhelmingly Apple-positive thread about switching away from the Mac:

OS X has been my primary productivity OS for more than ten years now, but I'm in the process of switching. I'll keep using my 2012 MBP until it physically falls apart, but make no mistake: this will be my last MacBook. Not sure what I'll replace it with when the time comes, performant laptops with a long battery life and 2TB+ storage are amazingly hard to come by these days.

My iPhone has a broken screen that can't be fixed without permanently losing the finger print scanner, so that's going to be my last iPhone as well.

On the desktop side, I'm using an iMac/PC dual setup (with Synergy), so I'm still dragging my heels a bit because honestly it hurts to let OS X go. Windows and I will never be friends, but there is no question that the PC platform is going to be the future for me.

To be clear, switching sucks royally for me, but staying would suck more. macOS hasn't deteriorated to the point where I want to leave it behind yet, although the writing is on the wall. But Apple's hardware philosophy and practice makes it so I'd really hate giving them even more money for yet another even more hilariously overpriced, closed-down, underperforming, outdated, unrepairable, not-upgradeable appliance that they think is going to be the future of computing.

> My iPhone has a broken screen that can't be fixed without permanently losing the finger print scanner.

I don't know why you're thinking you're going to any better off with some other smartphone. I broke my Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge's screen and nobody could fix it. Nobody would replace it. I checked icracked, tmobile stores, called around. Now I have a LGV20 in an otter case, and the class that covers the camera has cracks. These phones are fragile.

At least with iPhones you have a large enough market where small businesses can help. With some random android phone from LG with nationwide sales in the low millions annually I'm pretty much not going to find anyone to help me fix anything. And there aren't like any LG stores, like there are Apple stores you can go to.

I can live with the fact that they are fragile. Although I think part of that fragility has been designed right in on purpose by Apple, it's still my fault for dropping the thing on the asphalt.

My problem, and the reason why I want to stop supporting Apple specifically is that my ridiculous $1000 phone has a home button that is cryptographically coupled to the device, and physically bonded to the display, in an effort to make repairs impossible.

"My iPhone has a broken screen that can't be fixed without permanently losing the finger print scanner"

That's not true in my experience. Unless the actual button/scanner is broken (unlikely) you can transplant it to a new screen without too much trouble.

Source: I've changed a couple of screens for friends and family.

Edit:

Here's a repair guide that includes the home button transplant.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+7+Display+Assembly+Repla...

I'm repeating what the repair guys told me. I'll look into it, but from what I've been told, I managed to break the whole assembly.

Do you think you'll try OSX on PC-hardware? I'm not sure how easy that is to do still, but it might be worth a shot.

I've been thinking about making a Hackintosh, yes, but in the end I don't want to have a setup that I constantly have to spend time on just to keep it alive. I'm not sure if things have gotten better since I last looked into it, but it seems to me you'll have to live with a degraded feature set and constant tweaking.

    > the end I don't want to have 
    > a setup that I constantly 
    > have to spend time on just 
    > to keep it alive

It's admittedly been about 5 years since I seriously tried to use Linux on the desktop, and a little longer than that since Windows, but the biggest concession I've made to keeping my OS X machine alive is a `bluetooth_reload` alias. Is XF86Config still a thing? How about audio support?

XF86Config is now Xorg and is only used in the rare cases (dealing with proprietary drivers or strange configurations, mostly) where you want to override the defaults. Most people don't have an Xorg.conf file anymore.

For all that people complain about pulseaudio, it's been working pretty well for me for the last 5 years or so.

I'll admit I'm a bit of an outlier, though: I run xubuntu as my base system but i3 as my main window manager. I'm sooo much more productive on it than anything else I've ever used - it's amazing how much time I used to spend adjusting window sizes.

I was talking about Hackintosh actually, but it's true: I have the same reservations about the Linux desktop.

If you love tinkering, Hackintosh is certainly full of fun projects.

> My iPhone has a broken screen that can't be fixed without permanently losing the finger print scanner, so that's going to be my last iPhone as well.

Did you buy Applecare Plus? I broke my screen on my 6S and Apple replaced the entire phone. They also offered to replace only the screen, but I opted to pay more for a full replacement because the body was damaged. They never mentioned anything about the fingerprint reader being impaired after replacing the screen.

> My iPhone has a broken screen that can't be fixed without permanently losing the finger print scanner

Why?

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