Comment by bennyp101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bennyp101 | Hacker News Reader

I made the decision to move away from Mac at the start of this year.

I just can't justify spending the amount of money it costs for essentially a shiny linux box. I spend the vast amount of my time in iTerm/browser/IDE anyway, and having dumped iPhones a few years ago I no longer need the single ecosystem. (I do need to look into running OSX as a VM for the /very/ occasional use of XCode)

My 10 year old 13" Macbook is still chugging along, but it's basically becoming useless for development work nowadays, it just gets far too hot now trying to compile things - that will most likely be replaced with a Dell XPS 13 (When I can afford to)

My 8 year old iMac was on it's last legs a couple of months ago, so I spent ~£800 on building a new PC that should see me through another 10+ years of use easily. Running Mint on it, and it's handling everything I need and more.

I was /very/ tempted to just jump over to Windows 10, but the licence cost was 1/4 the cost of the build, and that just didn't sit right. Shame, as I've been setting them up for as a trial for rolling out 'proper' desktop/AD setup at work and it works just great - with the linux subsystem as well.

I'd be interested to hear more about how that switch went and what obstacles you faced whilst carrying it out. I've posted elsewhere in this discussion that my intention is to do the same, for similar reasons.

A lot better than I had anticipated. I'd expected there to be teething issues, but it was nowhere near as bad :)

One thing that did (does) annoy me is that I couldn't get the Apple Bluetooth keyboard to work properly, it would just randomly disconnect and not work until I rebooted. This is the most annoying thing I've found, as I still use a Mac at work (and obviously still use the Macbook), so I'm trying to add onto existing muscle memory and it gets frustrating at times. I do need to look at making it work, or swapping to a new keyboard at work so that keys are in the same places!

Software wise, pretty much everything I use on the Mac I've found suitable replacements for on Mint. There are things that aren't quite as /nice/, but functionally they work: - Transmit - Alfred

However, I still haven't found an email client that 'clicks' for me. I've used Outlook for many many years now, and it works just fine for what I need, so Evolution seemed to be the nearest thing, but it just ... well, sucks. I've opted for just using the online version (I have office365 for my email) so that isn't /that/ major.

But then being able to install tooling for work from just the standard package manager is nice, yes I have homebrew on the Mac, but that's an addon to make things work, and I have to remember to do brew update && brew upgrade every now and then.

Oh, and as an added bonus, because I built the PC I got to spec it as I wanted it - so for the first time in 33 years I own a graphics card! I figured I might as well, add to the lifespan of the machine, got a GeForce GTX 1050 2GB so now I can play games on there as well - in high def.

So basically I've ended up with a much better spec machine, added the ability to do decent gaming, saved a small fortune, can put whatever OS I want on it, all for the downside of not being able to use the keyboard I want. (But I /will. be revisiting that!)

> My 10 year old 13" Macbook

> My 8 year old iMac

There's no PC manufacturer that comes close to Apple build quality. My dad is on a 2009 MBP that runs great. Well worth the extra dollars up front. Swapped out the HD for an SSD and that thing is so fast. I'm still on a late 2010 MBA. It could be faster, but I use the cloud for compiling software (a preemptible 1CPU/7.5GB instance on GCE is $0.01/hr, for an extra cent you can get another core).

So I don't really understand why people (a) serious people keep buying new computers when old Macs are great and (b) say that Apple products are expensive.

True, the build quality is great - thats what attracted me in the first place - but upgradeability is not really a thing with Macs. Sure, I upgraded the HDD, swapped out the SuperDrive for another SSD, but the motherboards only support so much RAM, so once you hit that limit there is not a lot else you can do.

Sure, for some people building things in the cloud is fine, but others (like me) I like to have things running where I am.

Laptops are obviously a different beast - nobody expects to be able to upgrade every little thing on them, and the Macbook will be staying until such time I can no longer bear to work on it, or it gives up the ghost completely. And I can get a better spec laptop for the same (if not less) price as a new Macbook - and have ports that I can actually use :p

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