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Comment by KarlKemp | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen the number of MacBooks at MIT, or Google's or any other tech company's campus? The difference between your notion and reality should really motivate you to question your assumptions.

The two most glaring errors are, first, that "advanced users" wouldn't care about ease-of-use. And, second, that "advanced users" would care about price as much as you do.

Apple is great hardware, an OS that works and that doesn't constantly bother you with notification (the most glaring problem with Windows, when I last used it a decade ago), and a native Unix underneath.

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Also, if you buy a Mac that's a few years old, you still get a great computer at a low, low price. I picked up an 11" air for under $400 off eBay and have used it to build a startup that supported me and my support person. Ran dev tools fine, ran browsers fine, and even though it was years old the battery life was fine.

You don't need the new hotness to get good and useful work done.

This has everything to do with marketing, not hardware or OS or usability.

Just because someone is talented in CS, doesn't mean they can defend themselves from Marketing.

I imagine advanced users want full control over settings and programs. I recently needed to turn off signatures to get a compiler to work.

There doesn't seem to be a rational reason outside iOS compiling.

I wanted full control over settings and programs when I was 14. Decades later now, I want an environment that works and gets out of my way and gives me access to the tools I want to program with.

> I wanted full control over settings and programs when I was 14. Decades later now, I want an environment that works and gets out of my way and gives me access to the tools I want to program with.

Nice deflection. Who says you can't have both?

Sorry - I though he was being a bit juvenile and felt like being similarly dismissive was appropriate.

I regularly switch between MacOS, Windows, and desktop Linux both for work and for home; I love fiddling around with settings and configurations to get things to work, but only sometimes and only when it’s on my terms. The rest of the time I just want it to work, out of the box or off the install disk.

I’m always going to love tinkering with Arch from time to time, but then I get my work done on Fedora or similar.

Ok, I get what you meant. And I won't deny sometimes I too get frustrated when I can't find the driver for some hardware on Linux or have to download some source code and compile it.

But I will still never accept Apple's approach of total control and deciding for its user. Each of us have different needs and expectations from our computer. And there is no way, even with all the spying that Apple does, that it can provide a "perfect environment" for each of it users. It just isn't true and not possible. So restricting customisation, in the name of security but in reality to limit and control the user from making any changes without "contributing" to Apple's profit, is just bad for us consumers.

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