> they haven’t experienced anything better.
I don't want to gratify this pointless flame any more than to say that I have used all of Windows (XP, Vista, 8, 8.1, 10), Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and macOS as my daily driver at one point or another, and I currently use macOS because I have yet to experience anything better. There is a simple explanation for your problems here: something is wrong with your system (or you are overtaxing it) if it beachballs constantly. This is not typical macOS behavior, especially not since they switched to SSDs. I actually haven’t seen a beachball in years.
It just isn't as polished, and even that's debatable.
so what is the laptop that would meet this standard for which you're making a judgement?
So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).
I've been perfectly happy with a surface book 2, and various Lenovo and HP laptops. They each have better and worse product lines. Currently rocking an HP elitebook for personal use and a MB Pro for work.
The hardware quality is more or less the same on both. With the pro, you get a moderately better touchpad, a bit thinner and metal chassis. On the other hand, crap keyboard and the abomination that is the touch bar, and no legacy ports.
Personally, I don't think I would buy Apple for myself ever again, but that's just me.
I primarily navigate by keyboard, so the difference between an acceptable and amazing trackpad is pretty minimal for my preferences. On the other hand, port wonkiness, temperamental wifi, okay keys, mediocre battery, driver issues and an utterly useless webcam convinced me to ditch the XPS the first chance I got. It's amazing I used it nearly 18 months.
This is where it started... https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-24-dell-now-offering-studio...
Milage may vary with other manufacturers, it doesn't look like you would change to another manufacturer. Which is ok.
Check business notebooks, from HP or Lenovo. (I forgot one particular Dell series.)
Microsoft is basically a toy OS run by incompetents without reasonable QA unfit to be anything but a launcher for stream.
All these problems have since gone away thanks to software updates and (importantly) a BIOS update. It turned out my USB controller wasn't being configured correctly by the motherboard. If I didn't happen to check for BIOS updates, I'd still have lots of problems.
And that was still a better experience than the HP laptop I bought a couple of years ago. That laptop had so much HP crap preinstalled that it sat on 30% CPU usage at all times out of the box. The biggest offender was some HP process doing microphone noise reduction. It ran all the time regardless of whether or not the microphone was being used - and utterly demolished the machine's battery life.
Apple is far from perfect, but they have a better reputation than most vendors for a reason. And their technical support is are excellent. I've had thousands of dollars of free hardware repairs & replacements over the years when things have broken in my apple machines. I wish they didn't break so much; and I wish they prioritised fixing software bugs over adding features internally. (APFS aside, I would trade the last 5 years of macOS features for better stability and performance in a heartbeat.) But there's a reason they're so well liked on HN. They're still pretty excellent in comparison to the competition.
You said:
> The [mac users] that don’t complain have low standards
I agree with you. I'd go even further and say most users have low standards, because the out-of-the-box experience with most modern computers is pretty bad. Apple users should absolutely complain more when the out-of-the-box experience with their computer isn't perfect. We all should.
Apple customers keep buying apple computers despite their issues not because we have low standards. We do it because the alternatives are even worse.
I think you’re probably right about this. It’s like we’ve been trained to have low expectations.
If nonlinux users are trained to have low expectations, Linux users are trained to rape themselves constantly.
Here's my experience with Arch Linux: 1) You install what you need to install 2) You read the doc and configure to your liking, learning what the system can and cannot do and how it works with everything else 3) Things generally work as documented and you go your merry way 4) When something break or doesn't work, you have the knowledge or a general idea of what to fix
Compared to proprietary systems where there is no documentation and little configuration, when things break or misbehave you're essentially screwed. Will you wait for an official fix or look online for reverse engineers? You bought a black box and you can't just open it and fix it.
I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.
Learning linux doesn't take a day. Second off those black boxes statistically are more reliable than linux EVEN when you account for all the things you talked about.
The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a business advantage and unfairly strong arms hardware manufacturers to make their stuff work with windows. This unfair advantage makes the windows user experience better and more reliable than GNU linux whos' developers constantly have to play catch up with hardware.
In the last 20 years PC hardware has become ridiculously faster - and yet the user experience seems to have changed little.
I saw an article ages ago whereby Microsoft apparently had a dependencies approval gateway. If you made any change based on Windows you had to remove/reduce your dependencies or make a good case for not doing so.
I was hoping that would catch on.
Each operating system has benefits and downsides. For user experience linux is definitively the worst. Definitively. The differences are so large that it's almost comical how someone on this planet can't see the difference. If you can't see this then you are the one that is part of a cult.
I use linux every day for work and:
- Hidpi support is spotty (its getting better but still a bit spotty)
- Smooth scrolling in applications is inconsistent at best
- The keyboard shortcuts for moving the text cursor around are inconsistent between programs
- Hardware support is much more of a crap shoot. Linux has a harder job than macos in trying to support every combination of janky hardware out there. But as a user, I don't really care. I just know that if I buy a mac, the OS will work perfectly with the hardware on offer. That isn't true on linux.
- Lots of useful software isn't available on linux. Eg, I love Monodraw, but thats macos only.
- App distribution on Linux is a mess. Apt? RPM? Snap? Flatpack? Etc etc. I have 2 copies of discord installed for some reason, and I have no idea what the difference is between them.
Etcetera..
Linux gives you the choice and freedom to spend an unlimited number of hours customizing everything. With linux I'm in complete control and I love that. On macos, things usually just work out of the box. I love that too.
No OS is perfect. There's tradeoffs with everything. If you don't understand other people's preferences, that doesn't make you right. It makes you ignorant.
He's obviously comparing a linux PC experience with an apple OSX experience. It's a completely valid comparison but you're just being mean an inappropriate.
That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with right there.
I ran windows, then linux for ~4 years as a daily driver, switched to mac about a year ago.
I do back end/front end development full time for work + work on many performance sensitive personal projects, and couldn't be happier with the OS.
It's almost like different users have different experiences based on their use cases...
Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.
OSX is plenty responsive, and I basically never see beachballs.
It's not a matter of low standards.