The Mac is losing me
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underjord.io
10-15 years back, paying the premium for an Apple system got you a premium product. And back then, the premium was not excessive for the gain in hardware build quality and the software. Today, that is no longer the case. The value proposition is just not there. You're paying very inflated amounts of money for mediocre performance, nice looking but sorely limited hardware, and bad quality software.
My feeling is the opposite: There used to be an Apple hardware premium that was not (to me) justifiable at the time.
But as the software slowly declines, so does the premium - it feels to me like the M1 macs are priced with almost no premium anymore - there is nothing comparable right now (battery-life-wise, processors-speed-wise), but even with the Intel ones, a similarly specced base hardware is similarly priced (and the mac has much higher build quality than e.g. dell and hp in my experience).
The place where you still pay Apple premium is the upgrades (more memory, more disk). But overall, there's isn't much of a premium paid anymore when buying an Apple.
My partner has a new MacBook, a lot more expensive, and the performance is atrocious.
As my only computer, probably not. As a portable computer that I can easily carry around with me and use for ~70-80% of my work, absolutely. The M1 Macbook Air is the first Apple computer in I don't know how many years I'm seriously considering buying.
As for build quality, have you actually used and seen a recent premium Dell or HP? The difference in quality is minimal.
As for price, when you build a comparable system, price are similar between companies.
I haven’t used a recent premium HP - I used them a lot in the past though (that’s the reason I won’t touch them....). I have used a recent premium Dell. No dice. Nothing except the premium Thinkpad is in the same league in my opinion and experience. And the comparable thinkpads are comparable in price.
I assume he had amazing attention to detail.
95% (guessing) of the people use their computer only for email/browsing and gaming. Apple is a premium brand for them, bought as a statement (I am cool, or something).
People pay premium for most things: clothing, watches, cars, etc. Many of these more expensive things we buy do not differ much of the competition, except for being a well known brand.
I was happy to pay a premium for a premium platform, but this is not what I’ve been getting in the last 5 years - what I’ve been getting is a support role to the iPhone ecosystem that is the alpha and the omega of Apple’s strategy, and more and more restrictions to satisfy this role. Obviously this is good for them, but it just isn’t for me, so I’m out.
Pop!_OS is Ubuntu based but with Flatpak instead of Snap and without the Ubuntu calling home stuff. Meaning it is great for development. Last time I tried developing on Windows I remember being very frustrated. Now I don't have Windows installed on anything and I am happier for it.
I've tried so fedora, Pop!_OS, elementary, KDE Neon. As a long term Ubuntu / Debian (server) user I was used to apt but would be open to other package managers. Based on my trials, I'm probably going to go ahead with KDE Neon, that is Ubuntu with KDE Plasma Desktop. This seems to be a nice cross-over between Windows 10 and MacOS with sane defaults but enough options to tailor it to my liking.
I find my daily routines have been deeply overfitted to macbook/macOS on a firmware level. The sunk cost can be quite staggering for users like me.
When did that happen? Just opened the system preferences on my Win10 desktop, its still shitty.
However, may be in a few years they could catch up ?
I've gone crazy trying to find a good, maintained GNOME terminal with good implementation of Smart Copy (Ctrl-C copies if there's a selection, which is unnecessary under OSX) and some semblance of UI. Kitty was the best but it has no UI, which means you need a cheatsheet for the first month of usage to remember how the heck to access the scrollback buffer when you're doing some late night server debugging.
Windows Terminal has GPU acceleration, splits, a good implementation of Smart Copy, the fact that it does both WSL2 and PowerShell is pretty neat. No tmux integration yet, but I don't use tmux personally.
That's because macOS uses a wholly different keyboard shortcut for copy which is only a standard for Apple. The rest of the world uses the IBM CUA standard at their core. On a Linux desktop, you use `Ctrl+Shift+C` to copy when in the terminal. Alternatively, you can re-bind Super+C and Super+V to copy and paste - then it's just like your Mac. But I wouldn't do that [0].
Macs have all sorts of inconsistencies and hardships for keyboard users. For instance, open the `About this Mac` window (or any app running in the menubar which is not a System Preferences app) and then move focus away from that program. Now try to use the keyboard to switch back to it. You can't. The only way you can do that is by starting `About this Mac` over again via Spotlight or by focusing on the menu (Fn+Ctrl+F2) to restart it.
Aside from that, if you don't want to memorize keyboard shortcuts on your Mac you have to at least memorize the cryptic symbols that they show in the program menus. A sane OS shows the same words that are typically printed on a keyboard (Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Esc) whereas macOS shows you a caret symbol, a long up arrow arrow symbol, a lambda symbol or the "Escape" symbol that looks too much like the international symbol for the power button... and then they don't print those symbols anywhere on the laptop's keyboard. Those symbols are only printed on the external Mac keyboards, not the ones that come with your Macbook.
[0] Macs have so many limitations. You can't even easily change the mouse pointer color from black to white without buying a third party program - and even then - that program didn't exist for a long, long time. I've tried to force my Mac to be an OS that I like by getting rid of the hideous global menu bar and replacing the brain-dead dock with uBar, using Witch instead of Cmd+Tab, using Karabiner to modify all the keyboard shortcuts and so forth and so on... It's not worth it and things will break often. So now I just use it the way it was intended (but only when I have to - I vastly prefer XFCE and Linux).
IMO its significantly superior for programming.
It's also the reason there is less key on the keyboard, it's simply more efficient. Plus, you have the benefits of having the same bindings in all the apps. Either it's the terminal, your mail client or your IDE. `cmd+s` or `ctrl+x` or `ctrl+q` or name it, always do the same thing. That can't be said for any other desktop.
I know you can configure Gnome to have emacs keybinds, but it's not the same and many apps break the users configured.
The vast, vast majority of my Linux and Windows desktop apps share the same core keyboard shortcuts. `Ctrl+S` is always save, `Ctrl+X always cuts and `Ctrl+W` always closes the current window. The terminal is one program that doesn't - but that's fine with me because I don't think of it as just another program - it's more like a wholly different operating system or subsystem. Aside from that, the amount of work I have to do with memorizing extra keyboard shortcuts like `Ctrl+Shift+C` for the terminal is still overall less than what I'd have to do on a Mac.
I can operate the entirety of Windows or XFCE with just a few shortcuts that I've memorized (or not) while macOS will have you using the mouse or memorizing hundreds of distinct shortcuts - one for each separate function. Even something simple like switching windows - on a Mac you have to memorize 2 separate shortcuts - one for switching between programs and another for switching between windows in that program.
Macs also don't have keyboard acceleration via the "Alt key + underlined letter in context menu." They also don't have a dedicated right-click key. These are super useful since I can hit a key to bring up a menu and then hit another key to activate a menu item - no memorization required.
I've never seen anyone operate a Mac with just their keyboard. Anyone I've ever observed on a Mac used the touchpad very heavily with low efficiency.
- back then i was missing, pane zoom (only recently got added).
- looking at the docs, i think cycling through zoomed / unzoomed panes is stil not yet there. i might be wrong.
- configuring how the split lines looks of the terminal.
- moving panes to other tabs
found the ticket around panes: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1000
there is quite some todo left.
I also have many phones as a result of work, and have preferred Android for years — but recently decided I prefer the iPhone for my personal phone.
I'm surprised by it, in a way, but Android flagships leave a lot to be desired lately.
Google Authenticator feels like a side project that vastly exceeded its intended, critically important use.
I already had a Windows Desktop for game, and for the first time in the Windows history, I really liked what they did with windows 10. They also seem to be more invest in pushing the platform forward. And contrary to the popular opinion, I do believe in convertible devices. Also, I told myself I can also run Linux for development.
I then bought an HP laptop with similar spec than the MBP, for about 500$CAD less. Seem like a real save, but god I was wrong.
The fun with Linux lasted for less than a month before I just gave up.
The consistent (across all apps and terminal), powerful default emacs key bindings on the macs is a gem for programming and productivity. I miss that all day.
The touchpad is mediocre, they are all mediocre, never saw one working as good as the MBP. Even when someone told me that they're working great and let me try it, it was clear they never work with a MBP or don't use it that much.
Native apps in general, like photo, video editing, notes etc. are more polish and perform better on the mac. Web app though is quite different. icloud.com is terrible compare to onedrive.
Resume, battery life, screen, even if the tech specs sheet says it's the same, it's not in real life.
It's hard to put a price on all that, but at the end, I didn't save 500$ in value, I lost way more than that. Moreover, comparable specs, innovative devices like the surface line, are now price about the same.
Apple is not perfect. I also agree their quality is getting worse. I understand why people say that everything used to be better. But their customers can now do things with their hard- and software that we couldn't imagine 10 years ago. That progress has a cost. Apple can't be everything to everyone. They're fine with the churn rate as it is.
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
(I get that Apple is now a media house, but the Big iOS won't do for all purposes. A computer, and we may say, historically especially the Mac, isn't only about consuming and a virtual kaleidoscope, it's also the universal means of production since a few decades ago.)
From what little experience i have with it (being recently released), everything still just works as expected. They changed the layout of a few things, but at least from my usage perspective it still works every bit as well as the previous versions.
Granted, i mostly use mail, text editors, terminals and browsers with the occational hobby photo editing and 3d printing slicers, but for my programming and photo workflows it still fits the bill nicely.
I use Windows 10 at work every day, and while it runs well enough there are still countless "little things" that bug me.
About 10-15 years ago i stopped doing "point and click" to open applications, and instead rely on Spotlight to find and open apps. This works 99% of the time. On windows ... not so much. Press the windows key, start typing, and it either doesn't find what you're trying to open, or it finds it, but in the time it takes my brain to register the correct result i have typed another (correct) letter, and the wanted result is gone, replaced by some annoying Bing website.
Control Panel ? Why do we need 3-4 of them ?
Actually, no. All these examples are about orientation and how the UI paradigms integrate with the human neural physis. This isn't simply changeable by accustomization. E.g., if the primary structure of the visual field breaks (like the one given by the primary horizontal contours), our brain blocks for a full situational update (which takes about 0.2 secs). Similarly, visual orientation is considerably faster than reading lists. Identifying a colored dot on the screen chips just a single bit from your stack of working memory. Aiming at an invisible point target is difficult and requires extra attention. This isn't subject to negotiation, it's just how we are wired.
Edit, another perspective on this: Toys tend to be robust and to grab as much attention as possible. Professional tools, on the other hand, are sometimes delicate, you should know what you're doing, and they are also highly optimized to facilitate a trade and not to get in its way. From this perspective, Big Sur progresses on the toy scale. This is good news for a media house that uses this contraption as the primary outlet, but it may be bad news for those who use it as professional tool.
On the contrary, I think younger people seem to get worse with tech, which should not happen but can easily be explained by manufacturers locking down environments.
Maybe they just aren't that interested, true, but I don't think Apple is revolutionary on any one feature to be honest.
Yes, kids these days have less fundamental knowledge about tech. But that's because a lot of problems that were interesting to us are now solved. My son doesn't have to know anything about modems, BBS'es, sound cards and MP3 codecs in order to listen to music. He can just start Spotify on almost every device in our household. It took me months to know how to do that.
Each case is different, yet they often seem to be placed in the same bin. Take one of the big discussion points this week, verification of software. It is hard to say whether it is better or worse. System security is more important than ever, so it can be argued it is better. At the same time, there is a cost. There are times when it may not be reliable and there is a potential to use it for planned obsolecence. Planned obsolecence may not be an issue for the first time buyer or someone who is experiencing a lot of change in their life (mostly the young), yet it will have an impact upon people who have progressed beyond that stage and have other priorities in life.
That is definitely not the point of the article. In the author's experience he has a direct loss of functionality, like the throttling or the inability to install not verified software.
If anything the nostalgic conservative position for me to take would be that Macs are still awesome and cool despite any critiques.
What big innovation would be scaring me away at this point? Changing architectures? That's happened in the past. Macbooks are still macbooks more or less.
Locking down the system more and more each generation isn't innovation. It isn't "conservative" to criticize vendor lock in or to prefer more user freedom over the familiar comfort of Apple's design language.
BUT the new Air can compile Rust in half the time as the 16" MBP, Tensorflow it many times faster, 1.5 hours of web browsing and YouTube depleted only 4% battery. And that's just less than a week of testing. This is the biggest proof yet that Apple's approach to hardware+software was always the right one for them.
Now, I do disagree with the increasing control they exert, how they prevent you from upgrading directly or installing other OSes. I hope they start to care more about developers and tinkerers in the future.
I've always loved Windows and Linux, and I've gone back to it after trying a MacBook, but I can't deny what they have achieved with the M1 has given me second though about using an MBP as my main computer in the future.
Besides the "keyboardgate" on recent Macbook Pro's, i don't really have any complaints about the hardware. Maybe it's getting worse, but still way ahead of the generic PC vendor quality. I have a 2009 MBP that still sees daily use, and still fulfills a purpose (not it's original one). I can't say that for any of my regular laptops. Just a simple thing as the touchpad. On my Mac it "just works" as i expect it to, and rarely gets in my way. I've yet to meet a generic PC touchpad that doesn't annoy me in 30 seconds or less.
As for the software. I can't really say it's gotten worse. I rarely experience crashes on my Macs, and kernel panics has been maybe 3-4 times in a decade. Most of the time i open up my Macbook, do "stuff", and close the lid again. It auto installs software updates whenever it's charging and not being used, and automatically reboots and resumes whatever windows i had open (minus terminal windows), so from a user perspective i never reboot it.
It integrates well with my iPhone, Airpods, iPad, and even Apple TVs. Yes i'm aware competing technologies exists, and individually they may even perform better, but they don't integrate fully with each other. As for Apple, it "just works".
Apple may be a popular target, but they're still a lot better than the alternatives, especially if you're dug in deep in their eco system.
I have the exact same experience as you, and even after using Linux om multiple machines for 20+ years (desktops, laptops and servers) I still prefer Macs and MacOS.
Changed work recently and went back to my late 2013 MacBook Pro for a few months. It still works great with Big Sur - try that on a 7 years old PC...
And I love my 2 days old MacBook Pro m1, the keyboard is perfect and the esc-key is as God intended it (yeah, for emacs...).
Counterpoint - I have an MBP and AirPods and often I can't connect them together. Both produced by the same company, yet quite unreliable together. It's probably related to the shitty BT implementation, or WiFi noise. But to sell expensive headphones that fail at producing, you know, ... sound, it's quite a feat. And on this MBP model there's no wired microphone input, because aesthetics, or just to save a penny.
I switched to Macs back in 2006. I've used every OS you can imagine going back to VMS. I like Mac OS the best.
I missed the whole "keyboardgate" thing. My daily driver is a 2012 MBP with 16Gb RAM and 512Gb storage. It still does everything I need to do. From the development side that means running multiple VMs, running Docker and general application development. From the creative side that means writing and recording music with Logic Pro and working with photos in Adobe's Lightroom.
That's what Mac does so well - it gives me a good platform for both development and my creative outlets. I was recently thinking about my options for moving off of the Mac platform and they're rather bleak. On the software side Ubuntu Studio looks like the best option but on the hardware side? Slim pickings. For starters there's nothing, and I mean nothing, that compares with Apple's trackpad. Then there's the fact that the "Apple Tax" has largely evaporated - by the time I get a similarly-configured PC I'm in the same ballpark price-wise as a Mac. But I have a worse software experience.
I'm looking hard at the new MBA. I'm likely going to need a new machine in 2021/2022. At a minimum homebrew and Docker need to be working before I can make a switch. I've been stoked hearing that the performance of x86 applications are as good or even better than their performance on the current generation of MBP's. That's an impressive feat! Plus I figure if I ever need a "genuine x86" I can always spin-up an EC2 instance.
For development and creativity it's hard to beat a Mac!
Since Catalina, it doesn't anymore. Or, at least it doesn't check as much boxes as it used to. And, frankly, it's not worth the cost anymore. I could justify the expense for an used 2015 MBP, which felt like a slick and comfortable machine. Can I justify the expense for another Mac, now that it feels distinctly uncomfortable?
Apple’s attention to detail is gone.
To me Apple are making 50/50 good and bad moves but they are maybe hitting 25/75 for my use cases. So they are losing me.
I really prefer UNIX over windows for development but enjoy windows for the 'office' software. OSX really hits the sweet spot in between for me.
What would you recommend windows with WSL2 or VM? Archlinux dual-boot?
Also look at X1 Carbon (lighter but only 16GB RAM), T-series (cheaper but heavier), P-series (performance, but big and expensive).
I'm on WSL2 now and honestly, I'm loving it.
Apple made it marginally more difficult for power users to install software they want on their computer so that must be an indication of their move to walling off the software ecosystem on the mac! It’s a one time one extra step for something that is a relative rarity, running unsigned applications. Unless all you do all day is download and run unsigned .dmg files from github, this seems like a remarkably rare occurrence that you have to address.
MacOS now defaults to being rootless! System Integrity Protection clearly exists to restrict me from running any code I want on MY COMPUTER! Well, except that it can be turned off by anyone who knows and cares to do so (i.e. the power user) while retaining the security benefits that it gives to the vast majority of users that don’t need the functionality it provides.
Nearly any move apple has made that at a cursory glance looks to be being made to close off the Mac software ecosystem hasn’t actually stopped people from running arbitrary code on the OS. It’s some weird sense of entitlement that power users seem to have and they get indignant that they have to change their behavior at all.
I remember when I first tried linux from Windows and the whole idea of having to sudo to install software made me upset. I’m the administrator! I shouldn’t have to put in a password anytime I want to install new software! Why does it make me do this when this account is an admin?! It was indignant and it was also a remarkably stupid take from someone who had more hubris than wisdom.
Whether people acknowledge it or not, they’re always making compromises when it comes to their computers. It’s easy to be heavily critical of the things that you experience on a day to day basis. Little bugs that are really starting to piss you off. The software making you jump through some extra hoop just to do what you want it to. It’s less easy to see the major downsides of the “other side” if you’re not there. The author of this article seems defeated and stuck between a rock and hard place. On the one hand he gets the Mac with its limited expandability, limited hardware options, and high prices. On the other hand he has a linux box with unremarkable to bad UX but with the ability to outfit it with (relatively) cheap and powerful commodity hardware.
Perhaps the vast majority of disillusioned Mac users are simply unaware of all the controversies and issues that have cropped up in PC land. They’re unable to see over those high walls and simply assume it’s better on the outside. As someone that regularly uses Linux, Windows, and MacOS, I can assure you that each of them have things that absolutely delight me and then another set of things that makes me want to smash my computer on the ground and give up on them entirely.
You may find some relief to the issues you have now. I guarantee you will just be replacing them with something else, though.
Last year might have been better, but a year from now you could think that again. Now is the best you can ever do.
To explain a bit more, I do writing, development, photo editing, video editing, music production. Nowadays, my sole computer (besides multiple Raspberry Pi) is a gaming laptop running Windows. It can handle all of these tasks.
Before that, I had a 2012 MBP, but when I wanted to upgrade to an other mac with 32GB RAM, a good graphic card and Thunderbolt 3 in the end of 2015/beginning of 2016, the option of that much RAM and a good video card just wasn't there at the time, and so I switched to the Windows world again.
I've been able to upgrade the gaming computer over the years to 32 GB RAM, I now have 3 (!) SSD in the computer, and it runs what I want quickly enough (except for Lightroom, but that's an other story ;)).
But for development, the feeling just isn't there, even with WSL/WSL2, it's just not as straightforward as macOS with homebrew or macports, not to talk about Debian or Archlinux which are even better, so for me, it always feel like "death by a thousand cut" to develop on Windows platform.
For video, ProresRAW is only available on Apple, and I want to futureproof my future cameras in that aspect too. Or maybe I could go the BlackmagicRAW path to be able to do it in the Windows or Linux world, or converting to Prores4444, but ProresRAW and BlackmagicRAW don't seem to like each others, and in video, I don't want to spend my time fighting the computers and the codecs. So I'll probably have to switch to Mac in the long run for that.
For the sound part, in my point of view, there is still nothing coming close to Mac with CoreAudio, even if Linux is good (with Jack & cie), macOS is miles ahead when it comes for example to plugin or DAW support. And in Windows, it's still not as good as mac for Audio, at least in my perspective.
For the photography part, Darktable is getting good and faster than Lightroom, but still not as efficient in workflow than Lightroom or Capture One. Buuut it's getting close.
So I think more and more of buying one laptop just for Linux & development (or even stripping a Chromebook of Chrome OS and installing Linux on it ?). Use my iPad for writing, because it's the most enjoyable "sit on a couch and write" experience. And maybe buy a M1 (or M2) Mac for Audio, Video, Photo.
There still remain the question of buying a beefy workstation with for example 128GB RAM and beefy graphic card and 10GBe and RAID, to handle the big audio/video/photo project. I wanted to go the Hackintosh route, but now with ARM, I don't know if it's a futureproof purchase...
Some people here mention paying a premium for a premium service but i dont see it:
- best case scenario you buy a tech which is 1 year ahead in quality, but if you buy a computer for min 5 years this reasoning makes not so much sense to me.
- you still have a thousand limitations such as games, compatibility with other devices, being locked in and the planned slowdown of devices when new releases are here..
Most people i know who had apple computers or phones did not even buy it for argument 1. They were just laypeople who just bought it because they thought it was cool, and actually were surprised by all the limitations afterward.
To apple only made their money on the power of FAME and "coolness" only. I dont see how the "product" has ever been any better at any point. (Ok except the iphone in the first smartphone years.)
So yeah, I’ll stick with my Mac purely because it is “cool” even though it has sooo many limitations that make it unbearable to use on a daily basis
Is it perfect? No. But the "it just works" slogan is still true enough to relieve me from the duties of a system administrator for my own family, like when we were using Windows. Spending and entire evening reinstalling Windows because the sound card stopped working after an update is not my hobby. I have 3 Raspberry Pi's running in this household and that's enough sysadmin work for me.
Yes it's expensive, but less than you'd think. Try reselling a year old Windows PC. Almost impossible. A year old Macbook? You can sell it within 15 minutes for a good price.
So the biggest advantage of Macs is that you can get rid of them easily? :)