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Comment by rienbdj | Hacker News Reader

I used to say “I don’t need to run Linux day-to-day, but if Apple become too heavy handed I can always switch”. Well, that’s not the case anymore.

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That stopped being the case a while ago.

In the last 2 years my family completely switched away from iPhones and has replaced most of our macs with Windows. I am the lone holdout and when this laptop dies I will probably switch as well.

It makes me sad. I used to love Apple. But they became focused on locking down a closed ecosystem and have consistently made the user experience worse. I hate Windows. But Apple has made themselves obnoxious enough that I no longer trust their upgrades, and do not want to be locked in to their fragile hardware choices.

In what ways have they made the experince worse?

Why do you not trust their upgrades?

How are their hardware choices fragile? Do you mean build quality or do you think their ability to build their own chips will fail them and their chips for all the ipads and iphones haven't cut it?

How are you not locked into the hardware choices of any laptop maker? Are there realistic, upgradable laptops out there? or are you switching to a desktop system?

Speaking personally, 3 experiences locked in my decision.

1. Having my phone break, one day out of warranty, with a factory defect. And then being unable to even set up an appointment because that phone was required for 2-factor authentication on my apple ID. (Which I don't even remember having set up.) I lost all data.

2. Having keys fall out of my computer requiring losing it for weeks. After that every article that I've read about how Apple has tried to lock down their hardware and make it harder for independent shops to repair has added to my concern that I'll have no options if it dies.

3. The Catalina upgrade was bad. A friend whose whole life was saved to iTunes found he was unable to migrate his extensive collection. His purchased movies, TV shows, songs, etc was over a terabyte, all gone. As for me, I was bit by the Catalina and Microsoft Teams don't want to play bug described in https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/macos.... If you look at the thread, people are still reporting problems a year later. As for me, I cannot run XCode, and can only share my desktop if Teams is full screen.

You pay a premium for Apple hardware. You used to get a premium experience. The "premium experience" that I have been getting sucks. And not on hypotheticals, but on actual bad experiences that I have personally had.

The last few years have been a bad time for Apple product quality. Terrible keyboards, broken backlights, software updates that lock down the system, and so on. They've definitely lost their quality edge.

That keyboard was terrible. Johnny Ive definitely went off the rails and this was a good example. They admitted it was crap and don't ship it anymore.

I don't remember anything about broken backlights being a thing? Can you point me to an article or documentation where this was widespread?

I assume by updates locking down the system, you're talking about things like gatekeeper. What ways has this actually impacted you? What can't you run, and are these apps that have had any active developer attention in years?

You say they've lost their quality edge. Do you mean quality control coming out of their factory? That their defect rates have gone up? Or do you mean their products are being poorly designed?

> I don't remember anything about broken backlights being a thing? Can you point me to an article or documentation where this was widespread?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/20/apple-sued-over-s...

> What ways has this actually impacted you?

None of Apple's mistakes have impacted me because I refuse to purchase broken hardware powering a walled garden.

> are these apps that have had any active developer attention in years?

I've got apps I run in PCem because Dosbox won't cut it. Why should I stop using software I prefer simply because someone has made something similar, wrapped in electron, running atop a hideous tower of dependencies and bloat? Hilariously, emulating a 90s PC running FreeDOS takes less memory and CPU than utilizing some modern alternatives.

> Do you mean quality control coming out of their factory? That their defect rates have gone up? Or do you mean their products are being poorly designed?

Backlight failures are both design and factory quality. The app lockout was software quality and design. The keyboard was design.

> But they became focused on locking down a closed ecosystem

That's who they've always been (post Woz, at least, which is a long time). They've always wanted to own the whole thing, from OS to hardware. There are advantages to that, but freedom for people to experiment, tinker, and run what they want isn't one of them.

Considering that Apple's closed ecosystem is like living on the Globex Corporation campus, and everybody else's is... well, like post-monorail North Haverbrook, can you fault Apple for wanting to maintain the control that keeps the UX quality so high?

You could switch and not buy Apple hardware. IMO, they became too heavy handed a pretty long time ago.

`sudo spctl --master-disable` to disable Gatekeeper, and `csrutil disable` in Recovery Mode to disable rootless/System Integrity Protection. Just like that, it's a Mac from a decade ago in openness.

It's also immediately a Mac from a decade ago in security. Heavy-handed or not, that is something people tend to forget (and no, it's not perfect security, but definitely more secure than allowing root at runtime).

The risk is, when will they disable those commands?

Any particular laptop to recommend? I am looking for a new laptop and haven't found anything similar to the MacBook Air (I hate the touchbar) for a similar price (the 16GB of RAM model). Anything similar is either a lot more expensive or the build quality is a lot worse.

I travel and move around a lot (not so much now, but I still move around my country and to the office), so portability is very important to me. Another advantage of the MacBook line is that I can carry one Anker dual USB-C charger and charge everything I have.

Any recommendation is more than welcomed!

If you're serious about using Linux as a backup, you can't be very tied in with the Apple software ecosystem. So if Apple concerns you that much, why even buy an M1 MacBook?

Personally, I find an Arm with 16gb and better than desktop performance very compelling for compiling everything for all my devices. I hope the excitement somehow spurs more full Arm motherboards by other manufacturers.

The performance is not better than desktop. Single threaded performance is on par with the Intel and less than 5950 (not significantly though) : https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste.... And because desktop can have many more cores multi-threaded performance is just simply way below. Of course when/if Apple increases core count in newer chips they may catch up in this department. Also desktop can have way better cooling. For example on my current desktop 16 AMD with 128GB RAM it goes sustained 4.2GHz without any throttle with the temperature at 60C.

there is no guarantee other ARM manufacturers will even approach what Apple has done and this is evident in how other ARM implementations work versus the A series chips.

Apple has the ultimate advantage of writing the OS and the chip and that level of integration is obviously not being met by anyone else in the industry.

I am not dismissing the possibility of an ARM desktop that is better performing than a similarly priced CISC system but I do doubt the level of difference Apple was able to achieve

In what specific ways have they become heavy handed? And how, specifically, does that affect you day-to-day?

A standard refrain from all people throughout who voted in fascist governments before the crackdowns begin.

Then shouldn't you be able to point to the specifics of what you're talking about?

You can’t run Linux in a VM?

I think the point is that if you can't install Linux running natively, you can't escape "undesirable behavior" by the Apple-supplied OS. For example, if you want to ensure your laptop isn't sending Apple information about what you're transmitting over the network, running a VM sandbox in OSX doesn't eliminate that possibility.

Right now VMs arn't running on the m1. the hypervisor stuff would only provide arm vms, so you couldn't drop a x86 unbuntu vm on it. Apparently it is coming, but it'll be a bit yet.

If Apple becomes too heavy handed, market forces would come to the rescue with an alternative. It’s a multi billion dollar industry, and competitive.

I doubt the invisible hand would help. Government can by enforcing more competition.

Apple’s share of the desktop and laptop market is minuscule. Competition already exists. Now, it may be that your use case is niche. But niche use cases don’t get mainstream support, and never have.

With huge capital costs, and patent entanglements. It's not something that some Randian hero can just do. The "free market" never precisely exists. Adam Smith himself was very cognizant of this.

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