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Comment by mawburn | Hacker News Reader

One of the big features Macs have for me is that I can call customer service any time of day and they can work through any serious issue I have with my Mac. I've only had to call a few times, but they were able to work out some pretty serious issues quickly each time. I think the longest I was on the phone was 1.5hrs to find out that my own IT dept had screwed up Casper settings that I couldn't fix.

For a work machine I don't really want to do that kind of debugging myself. I just want it to work. I've been running Linux at home for about a decade and usually have no issues, but when I do I'm not dead in the water with project deadline hanging over my head.

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> One of the big features Macs have for me is that I can call customer service any time of day and they can work through any serious issue I have with my Mac

This is something else that often gets left out in these discussions. For better or worse, Apple offers an ecosystem/platform, and the support to go along with it.

Suppose you do make a Linux laptop work for your daily driver. You're still left out in the cold if you have an iPhone/iWatch/iPad.

The tight integration that's offered, along with the ubiquitous(and very useful) iCloud is something that Linux just doesn't have.

And yes, I am aware of the various flavors of self-hosted solutions, the dangers of lock-in etc...

If I've already been fighting to make my laptop functional for work, I don't want to start the same battle again for my hobbies too.

If you buy a business-class machine like a ThinkPad, you will get a modular and repairable machine with typically 3 years on-site support as standard, in most countries. This is not true with Apple. Apple machines are essentially unrepairable in the field and even with the expensive AppleCare option, you will likely lose possession of your machine for a significant amount of time.

With Apple, you can take it to any store and they'll diagnose it immediately. With business support (which isn't even expensive for individuals; it was $500/year when I had it) they'll give you a loaner on the spot.

If you've got backups, your downtime for a dead machine maybe a few hours.

A loaned machine would be useless to me if they cannot swap the SSD. I wouldn't even be able to connect it to our company network.

How is your company's network configured such that you need to physically swap the hard drive in order to connect? What happens if the hard drive dies?

For our VPN details, I would have to get my IT dept involved. My point is that machines often need a lot of additional software and configuration. If the world ran NixOS then perhaps a loan machine with "backups" would be almost as convenient as an SSD swap.

OS X has an incremental, automatic backup system built in called Time Machine, which works pretty well in my experience. You'd just restore your time machine backup to the loaner machine, which would restore the vpn credentials.

Time machine is really a consumer gadget, I'd be surprised if IT departments were deploying it within organisations. Crashplan would be more appropriate, but I'm not sure how smooth the restore would be. IMHO not having a swappable SSD really sucks.

In my experience, Time Machine is rock solid. I've backed up and restored many times onto new machines and the only thing that it doesn't handle well is Homebrew (or anything in /usr/local). I've had the same macOS installation for about ten years now.

Also, in my experience, Crashplan is a steaming pile of garbage. Are you verifying that your restores are checksum-accurate? Are you verifying that all files are present after a restore? Neither was true for me, and support were unable to help.

I appreciate the convenience of such stores where they exist, but neither Ireland nor Norway has any apple stores. Only third-party resellers, none of which are nearly as good.

Exactly. The majority of my office is on an HP contract. Something goes down, a tech comes in that day and fixes it. The nearest Apple store is an hour away, and someone would have to drive it.

I had an issue with a MacBook pro in Ireland. A 15 minute call with support and they couriered a new one out to me the following day and picked up the old one. I signed into iCloud and Dropbox, and was back up an running in a few hours. Doesn't get muxh smoother than that.

Apple online/phone tech support is fantastic, I've only used them a few times but they were knowledgeable, helpful and I got to talk to someone with 2 minutes every time so far. Apple stores are a godsend as well and have gone the extra mile even when the Mac in question has been out of warranty.

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