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Comment by gigatexal | Hacker News Reader

Surpassed in every way huh? How’s that preloaded bejeweled app treating you? Still loving all that telemetry?

MacOS + brew + iterm2 and ZSH make it the best developer setup

As a fellow macOS, brew, iTerm2, and zsh user, I agree that this is an amazing setup. Telemetry sucks ass for sure, but AFAIK it can at least mostly be disabled (albeit with some work, but I think most of that is probably automated today). With WSL, you can still install brew and zsh. iTerm2 is amazing, and I doubt that Windows Terminal supports everything iTerm2 does, but that's not a huge thing.

As long as WSL v2 has better filesystem perf, it'll be pretty great.

macOS has as much or more telemetry than Windows 10. macOS is (somewhat) better at keeping the telemetry opt-in by default, but there's still nearly as much telemetry top down. Both developers are trying to make their products better by watching user interaction statistics. If you want to tin foil hat about telemetry, macOS isn't the answer either, you should move to a more paranoid Linux distro.

(At this point Windows 10 offers more ways than macOS to transparently see all the telemetry by turning on and using the Diagnostic Data Viewer, and through many pages of Privacy information documentation on Microsoft websites.)

The telemetry on OS X is anonymous, opt-in, and can be disabled entirely in much fewer (like, a fraction) steps than on W10. W10 puts advertisements by default into the core OS experience. This is not even a close contest from a privacy standpoint.

The telemetry on Windows is anonymous unless opt-in (to various Insiders groups), and while it is more steps to opt-out that's because it is more granular, which is a strongly beneficial middle ground if you wish to pick and choose which telemetry you'd like to provide (so as to impact product decisions of products you trust).

macOS and iOS have as many in-box first, second, and third party apps in the out-of-box experience as Windows 10, have similar "advertisements" of suggested apps in the app store and search (Siri suggestions), areas which are similarly "core OS experience". Everything is far more alike than it is different between Apple's operating systems and Windows right now, even if you don't see it.

Microsoft does not _permit_ Home and Pro Windows users to opt-out of their telemetry. There is no supported way to do it, you need to either manually hack through the registry and task scheduler or use a third-party tool like Shutup10 to turn it off.

Pro has the same opt-out support as Enterprise today. Things that needed hacks to opt-out of have been fixed in the last few years with Windows 10 and have opt-out settings. (Each release has only tried to get better at telemetry options, because Microsoft actually is listening to the feedback and does seem to care about privacy.)

The telemetry that Home is not allowed to opt-out of are the same bits of telemetry that Windows did not allow opting out of nearly at all in versions of Windows 10 prior to 10. (Especially, Windows Error Reporting has been opt-in by default in Windows since XP.)

Well except you're not allowed to run MacOS on a laptop with a real keyboard.

(To be quite honest I agree - but Apple doesn't make any hardware of interest to me to run MacOS on).

Yeah I will give you that. The apple keyboard that comes with the Macs is a cluster for sure. But... while Apple has done more for the industry in my opinion to force the other manufacturers to move their hardware to a higher build quality profile etc., the OS is still what I find the most compelling -- mostly because I am all in on Apple services (iMessage, iCloud, keychain, etc.) and things often look more appealing on the Mac (yeah I spend most of my time in the terminal but I do like things that look good -- high DPI on linux is almost there just not quite there yet imo). Basically it comes down to productivity and for me it's on a Mac, that keyboard be damned.*

I use an external Magic Keyboard 2 without the 10-key as it fits on top of the keyboard of my MacBook as if it should have been the keyboard all this time. But it was an expensive keyboard and not a suggestion I would give many people -- the keyboard should just work.

Fair enough. I didn't want to live with the loss of the Fn keys as much as anything. But my decision to jump the Apple ship was also partly economic, and if not for that additional pressure I'm not sure what I would have done.

So after a long time having been OS X-exclusive, for the past year I've used both Windows 10 and Linux. I've really been equally happy and frustrated with each - all 3 of the majors have their strengths and weaknesses. I think OS X overall has the balance I prefer, but it's by a far smaller margin than I would have thought, say, 5 years ago.

And there I agree with you, too. Laptops really have come a long way in build quality and usability.

I want a new MacBook but will likely wait until my late model top-of-the-line 2013 MacBook Pro dies and buy the Arm based ones they're rumored to release because I simply can't afford a 3k+ laptop now.

Even if some folks do not care about absolute monetary price, there can be other hurdles. For example, for corporate purchases, there are countries where you have per item limit, up until which you can expense your purchases into given year, or above which you must depreciate the item.

In my country, Apple computers moved into the must depreciate for 4 years territory, which is simply unacceptable to corporate buyers there (as depreciated asset, it the paperwork is more involved, and therefore needs additional time and expenses). Meanwhile, Lenovo or Dell sales know how to make the price right, so everybody is satisfied.

My 2015 rMBP was 1 EUR below this limit. I don't know what to replace it with, if needed.

Amortisation burocracy is not that complicated. 4 book records and one additional document per year, well under £1 in labour and paper. Source:my dad is a former accountant

Here, it is 2 records at purchase (purchase+asset creation) per item, 1 every month (depreciation) per item, plus 1 yearly (accounting for deferred tax assets). Then some at the end of the period (reconciliation of the deferred tax, asset retirement). The period has to be tracked per each item. Each asset has to have its asset card and a tag.

For machinery and buildings, OK. But for a laptop, that maybe barely survives it's depreciation period? Well, no. Folks have other things to do than paperwork for laptops.

The entire point of the asset depreciation is, that the state wants the tax money as soon as possible, and shift your deductibles into future. What you want, is to shift as much as possible of your deductibles into the current year (and it is cash out in this year, after all). I and many others don't see why small, relatively quickly consumable items like laptops should be handled the way big assets are, and the sales at other vendors understand that very well.

If you are a small company with external accountant, it will be significantly more than 1 EUR in labor and paper.

>Well except you're not allowed to run MacOS on a laptop with a real keyboard.

I use the keyboard that came with my 2001 Mac Cube. You can't get a more real keyboard than that.

I read that for a moment as you claiming the Cube as your laptop (cool: definitely, but laptop: no). But I see what you mean now.

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