There are some pretty legitimate reasons to come away from Apple products now in my opinion, including some very competitive hardware at lower prices. I've been quite a happy Linux user for a long time now.
I had a recent fun project where I needed to install Python and a bunch of Python tooling and libraries (Jupyter, matplotlib, numpy, pandas, etc). Setting PATH on Windows is one of the most bizarre things. And even then I could not get everything to work. There were weird version conflicts, and this was all trying to use the Linux Subsystem for Windows which was insanely slow.
Why can’t I just update one file on my file system from a text editor to update path configuration?
You have benchmarks for this? I’m running a Windows Pro installation with a Core i7 4790K and 16GB memory. My 2015 MacBook is much faster. I honestly thought the WSL thing was just a gimmick and some online searching told me that there are IO performance issues.
In this case, but there are plenty of examples of a sub-par performance from Apple. Broken keyboards, display cable issues, shipping with overheating CPU profiles, removing buttons, useless touch bar display, removal of ports - to name a few. As Rossman says: "the only part on a MacBook that doesn't blow are the fuses".
> they also run macOS
Again, not been a fan of their recent work. I can get a very macOS-esque experience in Linux. It's not always a seamless experience granted, but it's really quite acceptable.
The problem is the “can get.” If you value your time at, say, $200/hr, how long can you spend learning about Linux distros, repos, software, and troubleshooting issues etc before you’ve spent the savings from buying a non-Mac-native laptop?
This is not a fair comparison because there are a lot of benefits of troubleshooting, most of them intangible. If you don't like it fine, just get a Linux "certified" laptop or a Mac.
I don't see how buying a Linux "certified" laptop figures into this - they aren't "mac-like." And I agree with you, just buy a Mac if that's what you're looking for.
I wouldn't want to overstate the effort, we're talking a day at most. The reward is a machine that you have a high amount of control over.
A lot of software people already understand linux; obviously if you have to learn everything from scratch it's not the ideal productivity choice.
But if my two options are buying a Mac native laptop or spending the time trying to set up a "mac-like" experience on a Linux distro installed on an Acer laptop designed for Windows (the comment I was replying to), I'm going with the Mac native laptop.
You propose it's costing you $200 per hour, but actually you're also gaining real skills too that you may have otherwise paid for. Once you have a decent setup you really don't spend much time learning anything additional.
If you run into issues, there is a wealth of help out there and if you really get stuck you can simply peek under the hood, even make some changes.
This could be true about some models some time ago. The unibody design is now common among other brands and is not a particularly good thing - the two components that wear out most on laptops is the battery and the keyboard, and traditionally on non-Apple laptops you could at least replace the former yourself.
Now I'm not sure if it's Catalina or the hardware itself - but this machine became almost unusably slow, coupled with some issue where it would not hold a charge - I would routinely open it up in the morning and it would give me the dead battery icon. On this particular issue I tried to dig into it, and something was waking it from sleep every ~5 minutes or so - it was quite evident on the power usage graph, and I found some others online with similar stories.
And even on top of this the machine would occasionally panic and reboot - I don't think I ever saw my old MBP do that, and I'm unsure if this is a function of the hardware or the OS update.
Either way I got pretty frustrated with it, as it had moved into the realm of how I remembered linux laptops - a month ago I finally made the call to get ride of it (read: give it to the wife) and get a new laptop.
I picked up a dell xps13, turned off the touchscreen in the bios and loaded up my debian netinst and began the process. Immediately I was hit with the wifi in this device needing the non-free drivers sigh just like I remember installing linux on a laptop...
Either way, I got it done and I'm actually really happy with the outcome - most things just work (wifi, media keys, keyboard backlight) straight out of the box - the only thing lacking is the fingerprint reader, which apparently Dell is releasing drivers for. The thing isn't perfect - battery life is ~5-6 hours (firefox, editor, terminals) where I think I was getting 8-9 at least on the MBA, and this is far from the advertised time under Windows.
So all in all, I feel that there has been a significant decline in the experience on Apple hardware over the last couple of years - as I said above I'm not sure if this is hardware, software or both. Another anecdata point: the wife picked up a new iMac when they were released pre-Catalina - she loved it, however after the Catalina update she has had endless problems - the filesystem reporting different amounts of free space depending on how you view it, Photos not loading, the iTunes migration has caused endless headaches... So whilst I'm unsure of the hardware quality, I'm sure this is in part due to the changes in Catalina.
How’s the trackpad ?
I will probably remain on Apple hardware as long as their boot security can be disabled to boot other OSes (and Linux hackers continue to put in the work to support their weird T2-mediated NVMe flash) simply due to build quality, but should they go too far off the “can still boot and use normal, open source, auditable crypto software” track I’ll be forced to switch to something of lower quality like something from Purism.