People were annoyed because they don't want to run a different OS. Yes, you could get cheaper/powerful hardware somewhere else... but it's not macOS. Hackintoshes need not apply here.
Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either. They used to be brilliant developer laptops, but Apple seems to want everybody in their walled garden.
That would be System 76 https://system76.com/laptops/adder with their pop OS linux distro https://system76.com/pop
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/5umefi/system76_refr...
At the end, I went for a Lenovo V330 on sale since I couldn't justify the price of System76 plus shipping outside the US at the time.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with System76 in any way and have never owned a System76 laptop.
Their hardware, though, seems to be meh. Give me this on some high quality hardware.
I've been debating hackintoshing it (https://github.com/Errrneist/Hackintosh-Thinkpad-X1-Extreme) but it seems like eGPU support isn't there and that's one of the primary use cases I got for this laptop (CAD primarily).
- Application support for graphics editors that people need in 2019... you can either run macOS or Windows for this
- Built-in cross-device syncing like iCloud/CloudKit
- Smooth integration with peripheral devices (e.g, HandOff)
This list could be extended for quite a ways, as people seemingly want to ignore part of what still makes macOS great - you have very well done product integration across the entire stack. I want it to "just work" in 2019 so I can live my life instead of tinkering with an OS/hardware combo.
The analogy I like to give people is that buying a Macbook is kind of like buying a BMW after years building your own tuner car. I'll always enjoy building my own, but man... if my daily driver breaks, I just wanna pay someone to fix it. Gimme the luxury feel already.
> Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either.
That's 100% true. MacOS gets a little worse with each new release.
But there is still one area where MacOS shines: backup and restore. I've had the same user account on five different machines now, because I just restore from a time machine backup every time I buy a new Mac.
And I cannot think of an easier way to backup my wife's laptop than pointing it at our time machine server and letting it just work.
Time machine is the biggest thing keeping me on MacOS right now. If your fancy Linux distro solved that, I'd be very tempted to switch.
It has plenty of differences from Mac OS, but most of them are positive.
If Google could get Adobe on-board with Linux support, and built a consumer foot-print a la Apple, I'd probably go there.
Dealing with their crappy third-party resellers is just a non-starter. It says that Google doesn't stand behind their own product with their own customer service, and I just can't abide that.
Like what? The lack of all desktop software? It is only even halfway decent if you live out of a web browser.
You don't even need Crostini.
Google may convince Adobe to make one for Android like in iPad Pro which will function fine on Chromebook, there's no reason for Adobe to start supporting Linux.
That is probably not because Mac developers are inherently more "design affine" but because there is a very clear design standard on MacOS while Linux is basically a complete clusterfuck with 20 different desktops etc. So it's not as much a matter of getting Mac devs to also make stuff for Linux as getting Linux to be more standardized.
What surprise me is on the laptop keyboard layout has dedicated Print Screen and Insert keys but no Home and End keys.
Also, does macOS have a Unix shell that you can just start using for your work out of the box or do you have to use something like Homebrew to bring it up to modern standards first?
Usability is certainly an opinion. I can get a Unix shell on any OS, have been able to for decades. But we don't just want a shell do we? We want a decent desktop environment with a good system for managing application windows... We want updates that don't cause problems. We want a good file browser.
macOS has none of these things, not out of the box and not even with third party utilities to fix things and fill in missing features.
I'll take a Mac terminal over any Windows one, every time. Speaking as someone who uses all 3 OS's at work. The hoops I've had to jump through on Windows just to do basic things are maddening. Mac's terminal experience is one of the reasons I keep going back to it. I'm truly confused how one prefers a windows terminal.
> We want a decent desktop environment with a good system for managing application windows... We want updates that don't cause problems. We want a good file browser.
Again, you just described Mac. Spaces work amazing and still have better behavior than the windows version that's trying to catch up. Snapping left/right is nice in theory but I don't actually use it that much unless I'm on a huge monitor. And I have no idea what issues you see with Finder, which is generally a super smooth experience for me. Again, I'm just really confused here.
The current shell in macOS is zSh and the Mac wrote the book on window management (other than the windows snapping ideas, which, fair, but it is just one app. On the other hand, macOS is like a wonderful land between windows and Linux with ease of use plus all the power features.
I have no problems with access to working "Unix like" shell either. My laptops and desktop are beastly and have no problem running Ubuntu in VM. WSL works like a charm as well. But I rarely use either since for Linux development work and for running servers I use real Linux computers in headless mode running NoMachine for remote access. Windows being used for developing Windows GUI software duh, and for productivity tools, Video, Photo, CAD, PCB design etc. etc.
(Apple has the ability to forcibly push updates, but they almost never use it.)
The two things that break Windows are spaces-in-filenames, and max-filepath-length. Urgh.
MacOS is broken in a different way: no more 32-bit (so the death of legacy applications) and notarization (need an Apple thumbs-up to run programs).
I see a restart prompt about once every two months on my sole remaining w10 laptop, and it hasn’t forced a reboot on me in the middle of my work in over a year. Ubuntu prompts me to restart more often.
That's like comparing current MacOS with one from years ago which also has some weird UI things going on. In Windows, certainly some of these have been fixed but aside from being visual anomalies everything works.
The kicker for me is Apple hiding / removing the things I use, such as Keychain in the menu bar. OSX / MacOS is slowly getting worse.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/09/12/huawe...
Beyond that, for the desktop at least, I didn't realize how competitive they were on cost -- wow! I'm not sure why, but it looks like I can't configure it in a 4GPU configuration. If I could, while there would be a price premium over what I paid for my devbox, I think it could be worthwhile given the polish.
They did, they're Pixelbook from Google. Once you build a competitive 'mass market' laptop with Linux, you'll inevitably end up with something like ChromeOS.
My summarized conclusion is that: OS X isn't that great. It's not "bad," don't get me wrong, but it's nothing marvelous. Perhaps at one point in time there was some advantage over a Windows or linux environment but at this point in time, unless you're tied to some package tied to a specific environment for some reason, just work with the environment you're most comfortable with. I don't know how much time I've had to waste adjusting to the OS X environment (especially muscle memory keyboard shortcuts I'm accustomed to), finding replacement niche applications that were environment specific, figuring out how to do basic tasks that are simply different.
On that note, avoid committing to a specific environment unless your application really needs to squeeze out every cycle of performance. It's 2019 and we have portable options now for most application demands.
In which case, move home or somewhere else more to your liking? There's nothing inherently wrong with the way things work on Mac.
I have nothing against OS X but why switch if there's no justification other than for the sake of doing it (unless it's to satisfy your own interest, in which case: don't complain)?
Using the above analogy: why would I move from... NYC to HK if there's no reason to do so? Why push someone or promote a change from X to Y unless there's a justified rationale for it? Change for the sake of change isn't inherently justifiable in-and-of-itself.
Pushing OS X as being generically inferior (or superior) needs justification because I don't necessarily see it.
2. I've used Windows and macOS concurrently, and was always amazed at how bad the Windows experience was (though, yes, it has improved, and unfortunately, as alluded to by Gruber in his piece on the new MBP [1], Apple has paid too much attention to looks and not enough to functionality in the last half decade).
3. I found most "portable" options (eg Electron, qt, etc.) generally worse than native apps. Exceptions are pure CLI tools - they're great (use homebrew on the Mac to manage those!)
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2019/11/16-inch_macbook_pro_first...
> Now imagine I'd make the switch from macOS to some other OS - I'm quite certain that it would be worse.
My impression of everything Apple has always been "There is one god-given way to do a thing. And it’s wonderful". But as soon as you don’t want to do it that way, things become weird or impossible.
If that’s even close to the truth, it would make a lot of sense that the opposite road is hard as you are trained to do things one certain way only.
Interesting, I find hacking and automating and customising on macOS much easier than on Windows, with the UNIX underpinnings and command line tools and Automator and script support etc.
(iOS - agreed, that's a walled garden)
There were other things (good-enough port selection complementing the high battery life and good trackpad to mean I could just grab my laptop and go for nearly any situation, without taking anything else, being high among them) but they're gone now. It's basically the software and the trackpad keeping me around. I'd rather use a "worse" Macbook specs-wise than a Win10 or Linux laptop that's much better on paper, because the experience will still suck far less. Design, "thinness", trendiness, all that, don't give a shit. Give me a brick of a Thinkpad with an Apple trackpad, official macOS support, and a 20% lower price than a MBP at same specs, and I'll take that option in a heartbeat.
would you agree with this change to your description?:
"Yes, you could get [better] hardware somewhere else..."
When it finally broke down, I got a Thinkpad.
This new 16" Macbook would be the first in years that I'd consider, but it's just a couple of months too late. I found my replacement.
Same case for me but desktops and laptops are Windows based. Laptops: very old Toshiba which was super nice at the time. After that gaming laptops from Asus and HP. All desktops are built to order from the components I chose.
Hardware problems during last 20 years:
3 hard drives had died (one on desktop, 2 on servers). Does not mean of course that I use the same one for 20 years. Keep upgrading them every once in a while as the amount of stuff I have to keep grows.
1 Video card from nVidia died.
1 Desktop began crashing. Further investigation revealed that thermal paste deteriorated completely and the CPU would shutdown after a very short while. Put new thermal paste and all works again like a charm.
Other then that I kept upgrading things but now it does not happen so often as the hardware became generally good enough for just about anything. Well I am sort of looking at that new 32 Core AMD for server when it comes out.
Some of the others haven't gotten bad enough to deal with shipping them off for repair, but that doesn't mean they're working acceptably.
But I'll concede it's possible that this all a coincidence and we're a very unlucky sample. There's probably not a good source of hard numbers, since Apple only know about the ones who were able to deal with getting it repaired. I read that they're trying to do next-day turnaround for in-store keyboard replacements now, but not all of us live anywhere near an Apple Store.
For another point of reference, a poll from Basecamp: https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-macbook-keyboard-fiasco-is-su...
Specifically take note of the 2018 numbers. 6 of 13 keyboards having problem, and if every single one of those was purchased the day the 2018 model was released, they're a maximum of 10 months old when the poll was taken. Many of them are likely newer than that. 6 out of 13 in less than a year. Even if there's a biased sample in who responded to this, that's a lot of bad keyboards.
Anyway, I’m glad to see a new keyboard design, and if I seem salty about it that’s because I’m personally annoyed at my 2016’s keyboard and all Apple can do about it is replace it with another of the same keyboard that will probably fail in the same way again.
EDIT - corrected my group figures. One person has a working keyboard. And for what it's worth, another person who works in IT hasn't seen an overwhelming failure rate in their office (knock on wood, he notes). But most them are using external keyboards for data entry (with numpads), so the internal keys aren’t used heavily.
His own MBP is counted among the failed ones though.
Chromebooks do offer better hardware per dollar than other computers, but you are (or perhaps were) pretty locked-into the ChromeOS, or at least none of the workarounds seemed palatable. So if you like ChromeOS then there is better value hardware out there, but Mac is it for the rest of us.
If it's just about running MacOS, they absolutely apply.
So no, I don't consider it the same. It's a great hack if you want a ton of power for a build machine, but otherwise... I'd rather pay the financial cost up front and just be done with it.
There are nothing else making the macbook lines worth it. If Linux with hardware manufacturer come up with a standard for greater touchbar control, the mac will be out of circulation in no time.
I've noted this in a few other comments here but there's more to it than just the base computing system. Apple products as an ecosystem dwarf whatever you'd cobble together in some homegrown Linux-based setup, and Windows in general just feels... really messy, like there's no clear consensus on how the ecosystem should work.
Every software company I've worked in building websites/webapps (Ruby, Python, Java, HTML/CSS/JS/React/whatever etc.) tends to issue their developers with MBPs. None of them need to do so for Xcode to build Mac/iOS apps. A few people may opt for Lenovos running Linux, but they're a distinct minority who really likes compiling their own tiling window manager from scratch etc.
Why MBP as standard? Because you get a reasonably stable Unix box that also runs commercial business and productivity software (Office, video conference stuff), and the Adobe suite for the front-end/creative folks.
Windows is going after that with WSL. Linux is going after that with, err, GNU/Freedom I guess?
Writing Python/Ruby/JavaScript/Java/Go/Elixir/whatever hot new shiny, in Atom or Vim or VSCode, is about as easy on Linux as it is on Mac (and it is getting better on Windows with WSL). But when you've got to use some awful video conferencing corporate crapware, there's at least some chance it'll work on a Mac in a way it won't on Linux.
In north america Macbooks seem to be more or less the default hardware (also mainly my personal impressions - since I moved there).
As of last year, roughly 10% of all personal computers on the internet are Macs. Do you think a majority of those--say 6% of all PC users worldwide--are iOS devs and other professional MacOS lock-ins?