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Your relationship with both your sister and Apple users seems to mainly consist of condescension. For your sister, there's some added dependency: of course she's eventually gonna fold if she wants you to do tech support and you more or less make it a requirement that you get to make her decisions forthwith.

FWIW the stereotype of Apple targeting "beginners" who are after "fashion items" is ridiculous. There are millions of "professionals" using Macs. It's a fully functional Unix with a GUI that gets out of way.

Pick any project you consider excellent, and you'll find someone working on it that uses a Mac, even the Linux Kernel. Now, try to argue against that person's reasons, not some figment of your imagination rendered into a sack of stereotypes.

I believe the relationship with the sister is more like gloating on the misfortune of hers. In rooting for Apple... Which stems in a well deserved criticism of Apple.

Apple does not do improvements, it just forces changes!

When was the last time the changes were dominantly necessary for the sake of users? It was more like marginal in the past 10+ years. Instead doing excessive actions for the sake of questionable features mostly created for the marketing department and the clockwork keynotes! Revolutionary keyboard, charging, touchbar, blooming of adapters, eliminating connectivity, sacrificing usability for the rampage of thinness, force touch, new UI for the sake of new UI just to name some of the biggest issues!

Apple well deserve the condescension!!

(not the Apple users! They are just unfortunate trusting Apple)

I never said that.

I am a Designer and I have an animation degree, there are lots of Macs in the field, and they are not for "professionals", but for actual professionals, the computers I mentioned I used were MacPros that were actually rather interesting machines, and it was sad when Apple decided to stop making them (now they are making them again but with ludicrous prices).

What I DID mean, is that my sister is prone to being a "fan" of a company, instead of choosing only for the product quality, and this was a factor in choosing Apple's stuff, and more importantly, a factor in her being defensive about the company.

What I mean is: Apple attracts certain types of people, including some that become fans, but they are not stupid, if products are bad they start to hate the company instead, and Apple is attracting their hate right now with crappy products.

Mac Pros not being MacBooks is an interesting point. A wide range of products leads to a spectrum of quality. Die-hard fans may be the ones in the high-price/-reliability quadrant, but maybe 5x more are attracted by the lower-price/-reliability quadrant. I suspect that MacBook was in the starter quadrant, and the actual professionals are in the other.

Sometimes things even shift in a single product over time: establish a good reputation, then water down the product a couple years later. All the die-hards leave, and the rest are none the wiser.

IMO $6k is just too much for a Mac Pro, except if it rocked a 3990X (do it, Mr. Apple!). It might actually be worth the money, even still. Apple seems to support Mac Pro OS upgrades for ~10 years after release.

I am on a similar boat.

While I was never an Apple fan, I started to respect their products after my android-linux-hacking phase (Couldn't find better words for that period of my life).

Up to the point of considering getting an iPhone since I don't fool around with my android phone anymore, but what I wanted the most was to have a MacBook.

They've always looked so sleek and overall good looking, including the nice looking OS which seemed to have a functional GUI over a Unix core. And then I got one.

Last year my current job assigned me one to contribute to our mobile codebase. It's a MBP 2019, 15 inch.

From a hardware perspective: + Excellent screen

+ Good looking design

+ Nice speakers

+ Touchpad is nice

- The touchbar exists

- Low key travel (bad keyboard experience overall)

- Lack of non type-c ports (dongle land)

As for the software, my first MacOS experience was Catalina and the only issues I've had I'm not sure if I should blame Catalina or the software per se.

I use Emacs for my text editing needs (and more) and it has been nothing but pain (Some outright freezes, buffers have chopped display sometimes).

Docker experience is just bad. Since It's not natively implemented it has to run up its own vm to work and having any small container running will turn up the overall heat on the machine which, thanks to the bad keyboard, I can feel at my fingertips.

Homebrew is painfully slow.

The GUI is fine, but with the recent advancements on the other DEs (specially KDE) I really don't see any advantages.

Overall if Linux had better support on Apple hardware, I'd have a partition with it and only boot on OS X for mobile dev.

>Then the fact upgrading it's RAM was unecessarily hard and expensive and needed urgently

Isn't it impossible? It's soldered to the board.

Exactly.

Apple really let the ball down with the lousy keyboard, and in the old and tired Apple style, refused to acknowledge the problem and fix it with urgency (or support well the customers who complained about keyboard issues). And then the huge misstep with the Mac Pro and years of delays. Add the lack of updates or news about the Mac mini for several years. All this while, Apple was shamelessly selling old hardware for the same prices as when they launched those! Even now Apple sells several notebooks with the bad keyboards!

Then we have Catalina, Catalyst apps, the breakup of iTunes that’s turned out to be messier.

Except for iPhone hardware and wearables, Apple has failed to demonstrate innovation, honesty, integrity and responsibility in other areas.

The Six Colors Apple Report Card for 2019 [1] provides some scathing feedback from some well known names who live, breathe and talk Apple. It’s mild in some places, but never have so many people from this background been so critical on so many things (as I recall).

[1]: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/01/apple-in-2019-the-six-col...

You posed an interesting point which my mind immediately went to: How do you think 2008 apple would do against the sole of today given today’s technology?

Choosing a wrong tool (fashion and status product) for the job (science) is hardly a thing against Apple's products.

And I hate Apple products too.

I've tried very hard to understand what benefits a MacBook has over Windows/Linux.

I've boiled it down to- it can compile iOS apps, and you can use Unix commands. The first is Apple intentionally being anti competitive, the later is a genuine benefit that I nearly am unaffected by being a Windows/Linux user.

However the strangest thing came up in my research, the number of SWE that said they liked the way it looks. It's shinny.

I genuinely don't know what to think about Apple users decision making.

This seems to be a genuine question so I will answer it. I run Windows, Linux, and Mac. The reasons I prefer my Mac:

1. The most important reason is that the Mac UI is generally consistent and powerful: both the appearance but also keyboard shortcuts, modifier key behavior, etc. Neither Linux nor Windows has both of these. Linux has never had a consistent UI and Windows is just a mess (e.g. two control panels in Win10).

2. Compared to Windows, vastly less of the advertising and key-logging nonsense. No Candy Crush ads for example.

3. Compared to Linux, better software availability and quality. There's the obvious big players (Photoshop, Office, etc), but Apple's own apps are quite good. I'll take Keynote over Google Slides any day. In general Linux software is also available on the Mac (VLC, Gimp, etc) but the reverse is not true.

4. iOS integration is sweet: Reminders, Notes, Messages, etc. It's awesome when a 2FA text message arrives on my phone, get forwarded to Messages on my Mac, and then Safari offers it in the text field. (Can I do this anywhere else? Honest question.)

5. For me, Linux and Windows upgrades have been more problematic than my Macs. For example, Ubuntu 16 upgrade left a broken glibc and I had to reinstall.

I believe that Apple's software quality is trending the wrong way, and am very suspicious of Catalyst, so there's cause for worry. But I still very much prefer to use a Mac today.

Aesthetics aren’t valid? Much of the fields of architecture, art, design, and even engineering would disagree.

It also doesn’t seem that you have “tried very hard” to understand the benefits of a Mac. “you can use Unix commands”? That’s the big benefit you discovered?

Feel free to correct or add.

I'm genuinely trying to figure out where I'm wrong.