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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

Just reported this to my job. Almost all of us use Macbook Pros for work; and, almost all of us have multiple monitors all connected through Type-C to something (probably DisplayPort or HDMI).

I'm rocking 2 separate type-C to HDMI adapters for my setup.

I continue to be disappointed with Apple's desktop experience.

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Apple QC continues to plummet. No surprise, they are woefully understaffed where it matters.

I’ve found apple hardware to be better than ever, but Apple software to be worse than ever. I think they are building software with complexity beyond what they have the processes to handle.

I’m always surprised by this. Their sealed machines have heat throttling issues, graphics card failures, they’re not repairable (iMacs are THE WORST for this), keyboard issues, and that’s all ahead of the Intel chipset issues.

Until the m1 chips, I could say I don’t care at all about their hardware. Their software is buggy, but it’s irreplaceable and the most important thing for me. There’s nothing else out there like it.

It wasn’t always like this though... the rolling yearly releases changed much.

A perfect example: Xcode. Each major release is a nightmare and only after a year of bug fixes is it usable. And then another major release and it's broken again.

  > I continue to be disappointed with Apple's desktop 
  > experience.

Agree! I switched to MacOS during Tiger, and the experience has gotten steadily worse since then, double if you're not into the iOS-ification of their desktop OS. I know iOS is driving their +1T market cap, but come on.

So I pick up a beefy Windows machine for gaming and video editing. And Windows is just awful. They're trying, but it's still an inconsistent mess, UX all over the place depending on what first-party program you're in. I get some folks like it, but it isn't for me.

But I've also got various Linux distros running, and Gnome is actually really usable. And honestly I don't have a lot of bugs or missing functionality -- new Lenovo laptop, Arch or Ubuntu, everything just works out of the box, including external displays that don't even require an adapter because I have HDMI out! But there are definitely bugs and issues, and there's no software support. I'm lucky I get MS Teams so I can work with my coworkers, but I don't get virtual backgrounds. I'd kill for some first-class support from vendors, but I know why it doesn't happen.

Moral of this story: apparently, as we approach the year of the Common Era Two Thousand Twenty One, desktop computing is still a mess.

I recently got an external monitor for my work Macbook. I plugged it in and soon found out that closing the laptop doesn't put it to sleep anymore. I can kind of see why somebody would want this behavior in some situations. I can't at all see why this would be the default, or why there would be no way to toggle the behavior.

> I continue to be disappointed with Apple's desktop experience.

Same here.

For myself, I expect to be able to close the laptop and continue using the external display.

Why? Maybe if there is an external keyboard and mouse, but even then it seems bad. As the default it seems counter productive -- closing a laptop should do the same thing regardless of peripherals, unless you specify otherwise.

I'm a fan of consistent behavior, but actually I'm on the side of not sleeping with a display plugged in. Going to sleep when there are no peripherals plugged in is only a sane default because there's no way to actually use the device with no access to the keyboard/mouse/screen.

OTOH, one can still reasonably use a closed laptop if it has a display plugged in, so closing the lid no longer implies an intent to stop using it. Because of this alone, going to sleep in this context might not be the most sane default.

Some examples of when I've personally closed a laptop with the screen plugged in without wanting it to sleep:

* Working at a desk where the laptop doesn't fit with the lid open * Starting a video when connected to a TV in a dark room, where the laptop's screen is a distracting source of light

I'm not saying it shouldn't be possible, just that it shouldn't be the default.

Mac laptops have done this for at least 18 years, probably longer. That's the way they're designed, and how they are used by many people.

Then why is anyone complaining about it? I mean, it seems like a silly default to me, but if it's expected then I'm on the wrong side of what to expect it seems.

For thermal reasons this used to not be possible, and probably still isn’t on older hardware.

Power + mouse + display = docking station.

Isn’t that called clamshell mode? If so it’s been that way for years. Easy to change IIRC also.

At least going back to the original MacBook. The one with the 10GB hard drive, around 2001-ish, did this.

It's a feature, not a bug.

> and soon found out that closing the laptop doesn't put it to sleep anymore

I'm fairly sure this has never been the case, or at least not for a very long time. As a long time Macbook user with external display, the expected behavior of closing the lid is to keep the laptop running as if the external monitor is the main display.

you can turn this off.

system settings -> power adapter -> 1. option

I've run into https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an... so I need to use clamshell mode.

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