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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

I'm really struggling to update my Mac for any reason other than being forced to (looking at you XCode and Developer tool chain).

When these "major" releases risk completely breaking my laptop, I see zero incentive to update. I read through the release material and find absolutely nothing compelling. Apple seem stubbornly intent to celebrate these releases as huge step forward. Yet, the feature set is barely noteworthy.

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OSX Release Starter Pack

* "Bold New Design" - we tweaked the colors and made some things round.

* "Refreshed X" or "Powerful X" - we took something and changed it for the sake of marketing

* List of Safari Updates - Just, why? Why is that attached to an OS release?

* A bunch of other apps that are apparently only releasable with a new OS version. In particular, messages will take up 20%+ of the release content to essentially highlight the ability to put emojis and faces on everything.

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I've definitely gone from "I'll buy a mac because it's a mac" to "Maybe my next machine will be Windows. It's cheaper, more reliable, and just works"

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> I've definitely gone from "I'll buy a mac because it's a mac" to "Maybe my next machine will be Windows. It's cheaper, more reliable, and just works"

I got bad news for ya: I just bought a new Yoga a month ago and it is just as bad if not worse.

* Animated ads in the start menu tiles

* I've had to upgraded and restart almost every other day for 4 weeks

* there are ads that keep reapparing in the tiles on update

* there are constant popus reminding me to log in to my windows account (or problems that I can't log in because I HAVEN'T)

* nVidia ads popping up in the lower-right corner

* MSoft ads popping up in the lower-right corner.

* Also, day one: tried installing some LabView software and BSOD (well, the new pretty color blue they use and the high-res warning).

* Starting a new app takes about 15~30 seconds (I believe it is phoning home the way macOS does, not sure).

Win10 now looks and feels like an annoying clickbait website. Once macOS includes ads, it'll be an equally appalling UX.

The only respite I get are logging into AWS compute instances or my Ubuntu and FreeBSD boxes. They can't take away my BASH CLI.

EDIT: I'm getting a lot of "it never happened to me." Yes, I'm sure some of you haven't seen this. I'm jealous.

Meanwhile on my new MacBook PRO 2019:

* Fans randomly turn on with nothing running and `powermetrics` has the fan at 3200 RPM and cpu temp of ... 40C? I literally have to reboot to get them to turn off. I walked into my office one morning and apparently the fans had been running all night with no apps loaded and nothing using considerable power.

* Only some USB-C ports work with my belkin Gigabit adapter. I had to experiment with where-to-plug-what to get it to work. Apparently all USB-C ports on it are NOT the same. Grrr.

* Gigabit adapter never goes to sleep, stays warm when plugged in

* The apple display adpater port + USB-A + power jack periodically drops the screen, and sometimes when I log in I have to open my laptop (I stay docked), wait for the video to mirror, then close my laptop and wait for it to switch to the external monitor.

* Too many Catalina updates this year! But they are faster than my Win10 box.

You're getting downvoted but these are very legitimate issues. I still chose Windows but I was really, really tempted to ditch it all when they pulled off that forced Edge installation stunt a couple of months ago.

Oh, that's really interesting.

I have a W10 that I run as a second machine. Updates are annoying (but they don't cross the line of being "terrible" for me).

The ads are something that I haven't noticed. I wonder if that's manufacturer specific. I know I'm running a clean, vanilla install on my setup.

Yes, similar to Android, many manufacturers customize their Windows installs, and that increasingly means random ads in your system UI. Switching from Mac to Windows - especially manufacturer installs of Windows - over privacy or stability issues is jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Yes Linux is nice. I installed Linux Mint on a laptop from 2011 a week ago, and it worked fine, like a new computer (I was a bit surprised)

Plus a maths programming language. No games though

I haven't had any problems with my new ProBook, but it also came with Windows 10 Pro. You shouldn't need a $60 upgrade just to be respected by your operating system. Microsoft is trying to live half in the service model and half in the product model. They should drop the distinction and give everyone "pro" features, all of which are basic features in any desktop-focused Linux install.

I always see people complaining about updates, but I haven't been forced to update for months. Is this some machine-specific configuration or is Windows Insiders' update model different?

Once macOS includes ads

Considering that iOS already includes ads, it may not be that long.

- Apple Arcade ad right there at the top of the Settings app: "Apple Arcade 3 Months Available Free >"

- Very often when I just want to listen to the music I purchased, I get a full-screen ad for Apple Music that takes about 20 seconds to load, and cannot be dismissed until it does.

These two things are enough to get me to move to something else, if there was a viable alternative for my workflow. There isn't yet, but I'm keeping an eye out.

Ugh, you're right. I forgot.

There are only really two places to move to: Mac or Win.

If you're nothing but a code jockey, then sure, *nux/bsd can replace your day-to-day, but for the rest of us, we need one of the two, usually with MSOffice. (I work with Google, even they aren't 100% google docs internally!)

As a counter-point, having switched to Windows 10 on a custom built machine a month ago as well, from Arch Linux:

> Animated ads in the start menu tiles

I wouldn't know, I removed the default tiles and I'm just using stuff I manually pinned.

> I've had to upgraded and restart almost every other day for 4 weeks

My uptime currently is 7 days, last reboot was me wanting to manually upgrade to 20H2. YMMV.

> There are ads that keep reapparing in the tiles on update

Hasn't happened to me.

> there are constant popus reminding me to log in to my windows account

I'm using a local account, I don't get any popup to log in using my Microsoft account.

> nVidia ads popping up in the lower-right corner

How? I've never seen this in my life. I'm running an NVIDIA card.

> MSoft ads popping up in the lower-right corner

I think I got the "you should upgrade to New Edge" popup once, doesn't appear anymore because I did (I wanted to try it out)

> Also, day one: tried installing some LabView software and BSOD

No BSOD yet, but YMMV, drivers can vary in quality.

> Starting a new app takes about 15~30 seconds

I wouldn't know. I've got 64 GB of RAM and a fast NVMe. Nothing loads in more than one second from cold start for me.

Either brand PC are loaded with additional crap (of course I ran the O&O Shut Up 10 thing just after first installation) or my experience is much nicer than I've read on this forum.

This have been my experience also. It takes a little bit to get the configuration where I like it, but it's solid after that. Especially if you have top tier hardware (which you can actually upgrade, which is also nice).

I switched from Lenovo to Acer because the Lenovo crapware had become horrific. Broke my heart because I'd been a longtime ThinkPad user, but going from a solid X220 to a P1 that failed in two years, to a crapware-laden Yoga that had multiple failures in the first 6 months just killed any love I had for the brand.

Acer's hardware is inferior in every measurable spec but hasn't failed me yet, and that's frankly all I want from it. It works and it stays out of my way.

Nvidia advertises it's new drivers in a pop-up with "GForce Experience" or whatever. You have to have an account with Nvidia (???!!?) to download this advertised driver.

Geforce experience is entirely superfluous, really. I'd John st deinstall it. You can adjust almost everything from the control panel anyway

I was just explaining what the other guy was talking about. My Windows 10 experience has been pretty good.

> I removed the default tiles and I'm just using stuff I manually pinned

Yeah IIRC they can also resize the start menu manually if they don't want any tiles.

"Win10 now looks and feels like an annoying clickbait website."

Wow you succinctly captured how using Windows feels for me on a day to day basis vs Mac.

> * nVidia ads popping up in the lower-right corner

Sounds like you have Nvidia's "Geforce Experience"(or whatever it's called) installed. Good thing is you probably don't need it.

> * Starting a new app takes about 15~30 seconds (I believe it is phoning home the way macOS does, not sure).

Huh, that is weird. Have you tried turning off this phoning home feature? I think it's called SmartScreen on Windows 10 and you can disable it somewhere. But Microsoft are really the masters of UI dark patterns when it comes to this; they let you disable most of this crap during install but only via near invisible buttons to access these options.

But I agree Windows 10 is insanely frustrating at times. It's what ultimately gave me the last push I needed to switch to Linux.

> * Fans randomly turn on with nothing running and `powermetrics` has the fan at 3200 RPM and cpu temp of ... 40C? I literally have to reboot to get them to turn off. I walked into my office one morning and apparently the fans had been running all night with no apps loaded and nothing using considerable power.

Are you plugging your power cable into the left side of your mac? I had the same issue, and plugging it into a right-sided port fixed it. It sounds like a joke, but it's real.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...

Don’t forget Apple’s revocation of an API to access OS level request headers (re: Little Snitch).

https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/15/apple-explains-addresses-mac-...

This was Apple’s last straw in my book. Yes they’re backtracking, but this wasn’t some extra miscellaneous data someone forgot to remove. Further it took a hail storm of PR (in the dev world) to push change.

Moving to Linux ecosystem, despite loosing the rather smooth Apple ecosystems

They are backtracking on the little snitch boondoggle? I hadn’t heard that.

They're improving the situation on developer certificate revocation checks, but they do still exempt their own apps from the app-specific content filter and VPN extensions, so you won't be able to block those with Little Snitch or similar firewalls.

System-wide VPNs should still tunnel everything, so it's not as much of a security disaster as it sounded like, but I still don't like that. It's my computer, I should be able to firewall whatever I want.

"System-wide VPNs should still tunnel everything, so it's not as much of a security disaster as it sounded like, but I still don't like that. It's my computer, I should be able to firewall whatever I want."

I always use a "slug"[1] to (re)inforce a VPN.

It's extremely difficult to go around it - certainly not by accident ...

[1] http://www.kozubik.com/pub/NetworkSlug/tip.html

If we're talking about laptops here, this means an additional piece of hardware. If you're carrying around an additional piece of network filtering hardware, you might as well just run the VPN client on that, too.

I'm looking into dual-wifi travel routers that will run OpenWRT (and thus give me root) and can do WireGuard at reasonable speeds. I've been meaning to do it for iOS devices anyway (these things phone home constantly, with no way to turn it off) and now it's going to be needed on Apple Silicon macs, too.

"If you're carrying around an additional piece of network filtering hardware, you might as well just run the VPN client on that, too."

Perhaps - and of course that point is well taken.

However, if the hardware device is complicated enough to actually run the VPN then you are back to wondering how it can fail, who can attack it and how things can accidently go around it.

Not so with a slug - it is a dead simple bridge that can't be seen on the network.

I assume you mean wired, then? So, for the usual connection of laptop on wifi, there would be an ethernet dongle, to the slug, to a wifi client bridge? Three external devices?

If you meant wifi, do you have configs available or hardware you recommend?

> I've definitely gone from "I'll buy a mac because it's a mac" to "Maybe my next machine will be Windows. It's cheaper, more reliable, and just works"

I'm still on Mojave on my 2013 MacBook Pro.

The main reason I'd still consider a Mac for my next machine is because there's no other manufacturer that seems to take their trackpads seriously.

Why is there no real competition for Apple's trackpads?

There are efforts to make libinput compete, but maybe a majority of GNU users just don’t care because keyboard-centric workflows (using tiling WMs, etc. so you never have to leave the home row) just feel so much more efficient and ergonomic.

It's not quite there, but I find my Lenovo trackpad to be quite excellent. Probably within 5% of Apple's, which is good enough for me.

Which Lenovo are you using? I have an older Ideapad (circa 2017) and a new 2020 Thinkpad and the trackpads on the two are uniformly awful

Which Lenovo? The trackpad on my t480 is subpar to say the least.

Same for me, the trackpad is the main reason I don't want to switch away from Macbooks. It's just unreasonably good. I fear that the amount of software and hardware integration required to get to this level is so high the we will not see it anywhere else anytime soon. But I'd like to be wrong.

Some laptop manufactures want to be as successful as Apple and copying some of Macbook's features, such as soldered RAM, CPU and hard drive. But for some reason it just doesn't help. Instead, they should invest in display and trackpad and everyone will forgive such downsides as: extra thickness; maybe less "industrial" design; ports other than USB-C; keyboard keys that don't stick

I've been happily using Microsoft Surface Go for the past 6 months. No complaints (about the hardware - software is another issue, though TBH what I miss the most is a good command line & package manager).

I’m not on Windows but whenever I have to be I use Chocolatey to manage installations.

Wsl ubuntu and hyper terminal for nix, then chocolatey for windows apps should have you covered

Is WSL not supported?

WSL works, but it's not nearly as integrated as a native CLI in MacOSx. For example, accessing Windows files from WSL is tricky, the other direction as well. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely an improvement over what we had before, but the overhead is such that I still primarily seek out native Windows executables (was just installing JVM and Bison (parser generator) the other day).

My approach is to simply organize work so that anything development oriented is kept in the WSL home dir and keep docs and PowerPoints in the Windows Documents dir which covers 95% of my use cases. The new Windows terminal is also pretty cool. I prefer this because I've sometimes run into weird assumptions that Unix utils make in a Windows environment based on how they've been compiled (eg. If they're built using Cygwin)

> The main reason I'd still consider a Mac for my next machine

Well you're in for a surprise once they render your Mac completely obsolete in a few years.

> List of Safari Updates - Just, why? Why is that attached to an OS release?

Since a few versions, you can actually get the latest safari on the previous OS. So even if safari is the one thing you want you don’t need the update.

> In particular, messages will take up 20%+ of the release content to essentially highlight the ability to put emojis and faces on everything.

Messages in particular probably needs the new OS due to catalyst updates.

Confirmed, I still get all my Safari updates on Mojave (10.14)

Safari generally does current OS minus two.

> It's cheaper, more reliable, and just works"

I'm on Linux now. It randomly breaks but so does Mac so I might as well have a tiling window manager.

Yep. My 2015 Macbook (personal, not the one I use for coding) is still running 10.12.

I don't really want to update it, but am going to have to, as it no longer receives security updates from Apple, as you say won't run latest XCode, which also homebrew complains about and says it can't support my OS, and increasingly software I want to install won't cause the OS is too old.

But there are zero features of an OS update i want. I am terrified of what's going to happen when I update.

However, i still far prefer MacOS UX to Windows, myself. I just a quite fine with it on 10.12.

And my 2015 Macbook is still running fine, by the way, have no need of an upgrade for more CPU or RAM or anything like that.

I'm in the exact same boat as you. I have a mid 2014 macbook running 10.12.6. It's way better than my work laptop.

The work laptop is a maxed 15" macbook a year or two old, and it can barley handle video conferences, let alone bazel compilations or debugging in vscode. Keyboard and touchbar are a mess as expected. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

I'm going go straight to a Linux/windows desktop, since I'm working from home anyways. More ram, cpu and a real modern video card is basically what I want, and I won't get that with a mac.

I have a late 2013 macbook running 10.14.6 and it's quite pleasant.

I have a mid 2012 MBP running 10.14.6 without any issues. I was thinking about building a desktop to run Ubuntu Studio, but was worried about the trackpad and the complete loss of portability. Now I'm seriously looking at the MBA with the M1 processor spec'd to 16Gb RAM and 512Gb storage.

>The work laptop is a maxed 15" macbook a year or two old, and it can barley handle video conferences, let alone bazel compilations

I was in a similar boat. Top spec macPro, all the bells and whistles...and the machine ground to a halt trying to compile anything. Rust was particularly bad, but the worst was trying to compile modules for ONOS, which needed some custom Bazel massaging to begin with. First time in my life the "compiling!" xkcd strip[0] was relevant to my life.

[0] https://xkcd.com/303/

When the SSD finally craps out you can get them swapped out via 3rd party repair.

Assuming it's an Air or Pro, a better option would be to buy any NVMe drive, and an adapter.

Here's a forum thread for more info: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2014-mac...

Imagine being a mobile developer. Unless you develop exclusively for Android, you're FORCED to own an iOS device.

I'm seriously considering changing my daily driver to a Linux machine, and getting a mac mini strictly for running iOS builds.

Would need to do some work to kick off a build from the Linux machine which deploys the app to the iOS device, but it should totally be possible with xcodebuild command line tool...

I think the general workflow would be:

1) Develop on the Linux machine in Flutter or React Native. 2) Primary day-to-day / hour-to-hour testing device = Pixel. 3) When ready to build on iOS device, network request is made to the Mac Mini, which then kicks of xcodebuild to deploy the build to the device.

Would need some sort of fast file replication tool. And debugging would be a chore.

Uhg.

Yup, this is pretty much how I'm doing cross-platform development - except for the automation-part. I've been strongly considering getting a MacBook as daily driver after years of Ubuntu due to this inconvenience. But perhaps that's to be preferred over having to deal with MacOS every day.

Just don't update until you have to, or at least give it 3-6 months to let every other sucker find all the early bugs for you. Same goes with any operating system, not just OSX. You just don't need the "Oooh shiny".

I used to update the Kernel on my Linux installs the moment they released — the kernel itself was usually fine but man I had no end of trouble with downstream software lol

Last year, the Catalina beta broke my motherboard (it corrupted the SMC and my system would only boot into a blinking folder icon). I tried the Big Sur beta this year and it killed the keyboard and trackpad (can still use the power button on the keyboard). I am laying off on new OS releases from now on.

I'm skipping Big Sur for at least a while. I only have a MacBook Pro 13 that I bought earlier this year when they came out with the KB refresh, Intel based. I have it because OSX is fine, but has a great Unix under it, and I can run VMware if I need real Linux or Windows. It's a great tool, I'm in IT. They're durable, solid, and work great. But that Dell XPS is really tempting. My desktops are windows.

The one compelling thing to me is the smart battery management in Big Sur: it won't charge your battery past 80% if you don't need it (based on usage patterns) to protect the battery life. I'm also excited about the seamless switch between all Apple devices for the Airpods Pro, but not everyone owns those

Battery management is in Catalina too JFYI

Replace windows with any Linux distribution and I am in the same boat.

Paying thousands of dollars for a gimped developer experience plus the recent decisions around ‘security’ have been dubious to say the least (Apple granting themselves exceptions around filtering mechanisms in new network extensions APIs)

>It's cheaper, more reliable, and just works

Selected models maybe. In general- no. Not more reliable, not just works.

Modern day windows frustrates me just as much, personally. My kingdom for a stable straightforward OS without fiddling... I use Mint these days but even that doesn’t solve my woes fully (and there’s still software I can’t run on it)

So have you heard of Linux by chance? It addresses all of the problems you've listed.

macOS 10.13 gang, checking in.

This might be worth a read as well[1].

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25104828

Agree with everything with the exception of assuming that Windows updates are anything short of a dumpster fire full of dumpster fires.

Yes I spend more and more time on Ubuntu and it's actually great

Agreed. Ran into an issue this week where the forced upgrade of Edge caused some issues for me[1], but it was impossible to run "legacy" Edge because it was updated via Windows update. Why should we have any choice of the version of the software we're running, right?

[1] I know, I know, why use Edge? Fun fact, Netflix doesn't render at higher than 720p on Firefox/Chrome because of DRM issues.

The new Edge's installer does not uninstall the old Edge, it just hides it. On versions of Windows before 20H2 (build 19042), you can bring back the old Edge icons by following these instructions: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-s...

In short:

1. Run this command as an administrator: reg add hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\EdgeUpdate /v Allowsxs /t REG_DWORD /d 1

2. Download and reinstall the new Edge.

Note that Microsoft has said that old Edge will stop getting security updates soon, though I don't know what this actually amounts to as the old Edge's engine remains in Windows for application compatibility even when old Edge is nominally removed.

I'd also suggest that you send feedback to Microsoft about any problems you have with new Edge, using the built-in "Send feedback" tool or Windows' Feedback Hub.

What a great comment. Appreciate it!

Yeah, Windows Update was the main thing that motivated to switch to Linux for daily use. Nothing else presented a big enough pain point to motivate a full switch -- I was mostly happy using Windows and SSHing into Linux to work. I often leave my computer on overnight with the expectation I can pick up whatever I was doing, but Windows Update would force reboot without warning me ahead of time and I'd lose all my stuff. Many times I needed to start my computer and do something right away, but Update decided it needed the next 20 minutes. I remember one particular instance when I needed to shut my laptop down to put in my backback (it was pouring outside) and get to a class, but when I shut down it went into a lengthy update without giving me an option to skip.

On Linux I am rarely if ever compelled to reboot unless I upgrade the kernel and want to use specific features like virtualization. There's just no going back once you get used to this.

'It just works' is not a phrase I've ever seen applied to the Windows 10 update process before.

While bricking updates for Windows are rare, the most infamous Windows update bug deleted all user data.

If you want stability, desktop Linux is now the best out of a bad set of options. If you need more software support, run Windows in a VM where it can't destroy anything important.

I used that phrase a bit-in jest.

That being said, Windows updates have a bunch of minor issues, but rarely result in these machine breaking issues that OSX has.

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