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Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

My main gripe since buying a MBP last year is the sheer amount of third party applications I need to install in order to restore basic functionality.

I guess most users never discover these limitations but between this, the absence of window snapping (and associated key shortcuts), and the terrible external monitor support it’s hard not to regret the move when I stare at my (admittedly very pretty) laptop.

I get that most reviewers aren’t really heavy users, and seem to think (like Apple) that a “pro” user is someone who works exclusively in photo and video editing, but I need to get my work done.

It’s really disheartening that they don’t seem to understand these types of problems.

But hey, at least they’re giving us Escape keys back.

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> the terrible external monitor support

What exactly is terrible here? IME macOS is the only OS that can cope with multiple monitors of different DPIs in a sane manner, and deal with restoring window locations after temporarily switching from laptop-screen-only to external display usage.

"Walking" my windows across the displays with key shortcuts is my biggest pain point here of a bunch of little conveniences that add up.

I have three identical 1080P displays on my desk. On Windows, and it's one example of a bunch of little things, I can press Windows key and an arrow to expand the current Window to half a display - I press it again and it snaps to the next half, and does so across screens - so I can really quickly expand my workspace to fill the screen area depending on the task I'm working on (one or two key presses).

There's not way for me to do this on macOS even without keyboard shortcuts. There's no reason for this, and what's worse, with side-by-side view this experience should be better than Windows for me as I'm never working on less than half a display per window - but it's just un-necessarily painful.

It would take no time at all to bind side-by-side snapping to keypresses and have it operate predictably across multiple displays but they just don't do it, won't allow me to, and I don't understand why.

No no it's totally fine. You just need to search stackexchange and find a few posts where people talk about how this is by design, then find some random utility that kinda does what you need but often has a ton of bloat and will nagware you to drop the $29 bucks so that you can have basic window manager functionality.

It really is wild to me. It's like nobody ever used two monitors or needed two apps side by side...

> then find some random utility that kinda does what you need but often has a ton of bloat and will nagware you to drop the $29 bucks

Rectangle [1] is free. Spectacle [2] before that was free. There are several other choices for window snapping in OS X and have been since the earliest days. Personally I use Magnet [3], which was some trivial amount of money many years ago and comes from the App Store - thus has no "nagware" aspect.

FWIW the built-in Windows snapping support is terrible - if you have a 49" widescreen display, you'll find it can't snap windows to thirds of the screen and you're back to (true) "bloat and nagware" of third party Windows utilities.

> It's like nobody ever used two monitors or needed two apps side by side...

Since ~2002 I've had setups that range between 2 and 6 monitors - mostly 3. I've used Windows, Linux, macOS and OpenSolaris in that timeframe, and have found macOS to be _by far_ the least hassle for getting whatever monitor configuration I have wanted.

[1]: https://rectangleapp.com

[2]: https://www.spectacleapp.com

[3]: https://magnet.crowdcafe.com

The lack of window snapping is truly perplexing.

Agreed, although hovering over the green window button gives you the option to put 2 windows side by side in full screen, and option+ hovering the option to put them side by side without going full screen.

Still a far cry from Win10, where it’s automatic by dragging to the side of the screen, where you have quarters, hotkeys, auto resize etc.

I've used https://www.spectacleapp.com/ for a few years to split windows on osx

I used Spectacle for a while, and recently switched to Amethyst. It works very well, but it would be nice if there were at least basic functionality built in.

I wasn't a fan, it seemed really laggy to me when I used it

I guess you’re looking for something more full-featured than split view?

What is terrible about the external monitor support?

Honestly, OS X's built-in "split view" window tiling support is a sad, clunky, slow-as-molasses, fullscreen-only nightmare substitute for the instantly snapping windows you get from something like BetterTouchTool, or Spectacle's hotkey-based window resizing. It's night and day, and it's really disappointing to me that a trillion+-dollar company took as long as it did to offer such a mediocre workaround.

Without even talking about features, split view works only for a fraction of applications, I found. And only if you're happy using fullscreen mode

MacOS's fullscreen 'solution' is just atrocious compared to the default window snapping in Windows. It manages to feel both half assed in design and half assed in implementation. A third party window manager for Mac OS is a must. I use Swish and love it.

I run Kubuntu on my Macbook Pro 2015. It's way better than OS X and no functionality (excluding apple specific things like iCloud and Airplay) was lost, battery life is the same.

I will never understand this attitude that certain features from other OSes, however much one might have gotten used to them, constitute "basic functionality" that should so obviously be expected everywhere.

Window snapping is a cool feature, I'm sure, but how long has it even existed on Windows or common Linux distributions...? (This is a genuine question; I have only heard about it in the last few months, and I have no idea how long it has been present.)

You might as well say that a menu bar at the top of the screen is "basic functionality" (is it even possible to replicate that in Windows?), or Emacs keybinds in system textboxes are "basic functionality."

Different OSes have different features, and a blind assumption that something that has become a part of your workflow is a necessary part of every OS just seems arrogant to me.

And I don't have a clue what you mean about "terrible external monitor support". I have never had a problem with multiple monitors on Macs, while when I have to deal with even one on Windows, I regularly have to struggle with driver issues and the OS thinking that one of its several interfaces is the "primary" one that you have to plug into first, and it won't even consider outputting on another interface without being explicitly told to.

Window snapping was introduced in Windows 7, released in 2009.

>a blind assumption that something that has become a part of your workflow is a necessary part of every OS just seems arrogant to me

Like no copy and paste in iOS? Apple has a history of not adding features just because no matter how useful they would be and no matter how much it is holding back its users. That is arrogant, not the user asking for features that is standard for most.

> the OS thinking that one of its several interfaces is the "primary" one that you have to plug into first, and it won't even consider outputting on another interface without being explicitly told to.

This is just wrong. Windows since at least windows xp shows something on all screens as default. You sound like a Mac user who doesn't know Windows. FYI I use Linux primarily so unlike you I'm not biased (I think both has it uses but both also suck).

> This is just wrong

Oh, yes, thank you for telling me my personal experiences don't exist.

I have had this happen to me on multiple occasions when setting up Windows—XP and later—machines with multiple display interfaces. Plug into VGA—nothing. Plug into one of the DisplayPorts—nothing. Plug into the other DisplayPort—OK, there's the primary. (Or, worse, plug into the bizarre double-DVI with a special adapter, that one's the primary.)

Serious question, why are you using a Mac? Are you developing for Apple products?

Because indeed, most people I see using macs professionally tend to be artists (photo and video editors but also musicians, designers, architects,...). But from my experience tech workers and engineers are more likely to use PCs unless there is some special need (ex: iOS dev).

Edit: Downvoted, as expected. But it is not a troll. I recognize that MacBook pros have really nice features, like a second to none trackpad, nice screen, nice SSD,... Plus it looks good and it "just works". Artists like it a lot and I understand them. But for tech and engineering work, ThinkPads seem to be preferred. They are robust laptops with great keyboards and better connectivity. If computing power is required, powerful desktops and workstation class laptops tend to be used. Finally, for office work, Macs are often considered too expensive.

I've been an IT consultant for many years. I have been using MacBooks since around 2009. After an initial bumpy migration to macOS (OS X back then) after at least 10 years of using Linux (mostly Debian) exclusively, I never looked back.

It mostly just works and I can focus on writing my applications and operating my systems. I get a nice UNIX-like ecosystem on the metal and almost everything I need to write code I can get on Homebrew.

It runs Docker for those times when I want actual Linux locally, although I've been using that less and less since I can build and run my containers on the cloud.

I haven't counted but I suspect more than half of my IT colleagues use Macs, and almost everyone else uses Linux. Windows is the exception, where the only people crazy enough to inflict that upon themselves tend to be .NET/C#/F#/Microsoft-oriented devs.

macOS is the most hassle-free experience you can get. I say that whilst keeping a very close eye on Linux development since I'd like to break away from Apple eventually. Unfortunately no Linux distro comes even close to Macs in terms of simplicity and reliability.

Well the corollary to above is that there's some stuff that I find really helpful.

The ecosystem sucked me in. I got an Apple Watch and iPhone for the first time not long ago for other reasons (mostly I need to track swimming and could not for the life of me find a decent non-Apple smart watch that would do this for me). The integration between the iPhone and the MBP - as basic as it is - has been a massive productivity boost for me. Just having the call handling route through my laptop when I'm at the desk is a huge convenience feature that gives me time back.

Is it worth the sum of small issues I keep hitting like this? Sometimes it is, a lot of the time it's not. I'd like to see Apple fix these kind of basic things before making the icons look more like the phone, though.

Craig Federighi said Big Sur is the most significant release since OSX. Sometimes it's hard to distill the engineering from the marketing but I sincerely hope that's not what they really believe as it is desperately in need of another Snow Leopard release. Just spend a year fixing stuff that should never have been broken in the first place.

I had to plop down $3100 on used MBP (needed that 32GB of ram) because company I contracted for sprung this as a term.

After a year, I finally heard an unofficial and unconfirmed explanation that the reason is to prevent parent company from hijacking their IT with their own Windows setup that is apparently "known bad".

Still, resulted in me having to deal with mac and finding pain points daily.

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