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Comment by wutbrodo | Hacker News Reader

I agree broadly with the sentiment, but this isn't very helpful to OP.

Why not? Sell your overpriced mac and buy a new better non-apple laptop for less money. It It would have been faster than trying to deal with apple's customer support.

For all the downsides to macbooks, and those do exist, every alternative I came across is unbearable.

So yes, these comments are unhelpful.

> buy a new better non-apple laptop for less money.

This isn't as easy as it used to be - the performance of the new M1 Mac's is pretty great compared to the competition at a similar price point (especially considering the form factor).

They aren't really overpriced anymore (although it does depend on what you value). I've not seen another laptop I would trade in for my 16GB M1 Macbook Air at the same price point, even a year on.

What use is that all that performance when you can be randomly locked out without any recourse? In terms of gaming, "dead DPS does 0 dps".

Well if you are worried either don't sign in with your Apple ID, or just enable a root user.

It's exactly the same on Windows if you sign in with a Microsoft Account, what's different about Apple here?

And I'm locked out of the account, but not my hardware.

What part of "Tool for work" you don't understand? If this helps me make money, why would I buy a 200$ cheaper Windows/Linux machine? Am I more free with a Windows/Linux machine? Seriously? We can go all the way down if you want, does Intel/AMD/ARM let you see the code?

The AMD microcode, running on my computer, isn't going to lock me out of my computer. You don't get full freedom with that microcode in the free software sense, but that's besides the point in this situation. At the very least that AMD microcode isn't going to (purposefully) lock you out from logging in to your TTY, because it wasn't designed to do that. At worst, the microcode will be so faulty that your PC won't boot (and that, hopefully, wouldn't be by design).

What's happening on your Mac, however, is by design. Apple designed the software to do that, and they get away with it. That's the difference.

If my AMD microcode started doing that, the whole world would be in uproar. Because, at least in present time, present day, they're not able to get away with that. Same applies to Intel and ARM. But Apple does.

That’s a naive take. The intel ME is also there „by design“ and is equally capable to lock you out of your machine. And as long as only a small number of users are affected, they would also get away with it. The average customer usually doesn’t care about other customers problem as long as they’re not affected.

I'm in agreement with the general principle: I'm constantly low-level baffled that the default for the computer-savvy isn't Linux, given my smooth experience with it over the last 15 years and the primacy of having control over your system.

But there are always switching costs, and a billion long-tail reasons that could be keeping someone on a platform. The odds are minuscule that a) switching is a reasonable option on a timescale that would help OP and b) he's unaware of the option.

> I'm constantly low-level baffled that the default for the computer-savvy isn't Linux, given my smooth experience with it over the last 15 years and the primacy of having control over your system.

While I agree with you, a Linux machine cant be used to develop iOS apps. I tried for some time using an external build service for my Cordova apps and it wasn't very smooth. In the end, I gave up and bought an old macbook. The problem is, Apple tends to drop support for older hardware withe very iteration, and now (thanks to dosdude!) I reached the maximum supported age for recent Xcode versions. Something inside me is revolting against buying a new macbook just to keep my app in the apps store (yes they need to be updated even if they are feature complete to fit in the new requirements).

> a Linux machine cant be used to develop iOS apps

Of course, and serious gamers or users of specialty software may still need Windows, etc etc. These are examples of the "billions of reasons" that I alluded to in my comment, and it's why i took care to refer to it as the _default_ choice, not the universal one.

Since you only really need command line access (graphics performance is a non-issue), you might consider VMWare? Either to run new macOS versions as guests in your older OS (I have macOS 11 virtualized within OS X 10.9), or even from Windows or Linux (with the VMWare EFI patch to remove the Apple hardware check).

(Or Virtualbox or Parallels, but I've consistently found VMWare to be the best with macOS guests.)

This sounds fine from a technology perspective, but personally I wouldn't be comfortable building iOS apps professionally running osx in a VM - I'm fairly sure this violates the license which could turn into a big head ache later.

(Linux user who wishes there was an easy way to build iOS apps from Linux)

Virtualizing macOS is explicitly allowed by Apple as long as you do so on Apple hardware.

Can you show me these better laptops ?

Lenovo Thinkpad and Dell precision are two product lines of the same tier or higher. With both you can choose your OS and with most Thinkpad models you can even customize the hardware, plus you get 3 years of on-site express assistance for less than 100€. These are all durable machines that will last you years.

I have a Thinkpad X1.

It struggles with just a few dozen tabs open. Opening a new Google doc takes ten seconds. And no, it isn’t out of memory; it’s just slow. The CPU isn’t maxed out, but I think the GPU is.

It’s hot, and the battery life is maybe three hours.

I also have an M1 MacBook. Under the same workload it’s cool to the touch, window switching is instant, opening a new doc takes maybe two seconds, and battery life is about eight hours.

The X1 comes with a variety of CPUs depending on the gen and the price tag AFAIK. Make the comparison on CPU power and available RAM, not on the model. I owned an X1 carbon for a year and half (work laptop) and it would handle any workload (multiple open editors, dozens of browser tabs open, docker-compose with multiple services on, etc) without lag, while still having a great battery life. The price tag for my model was ~2200€.

Now I use a somewhat old P51 and it's an absolute beast, but is certainly a brick when compared to lighter models like the X1 or a MacBook.

I have a T14 with an AMD CPU. Plenty fast, not hot and battery lasts about 6-8 hours. CPU-wise, I'd of course prefer the M1, though. Intel CPUs are not great in laptops.

I don't like what Lenovo has done to the T-line, but Thinkpads in general are still high quality in my opinion.

My laptop before I switched to MacBook M1 was a relatively high end ThinkPad Carbon X1. It was okay but the MacBook pro are a lot better despite the lack of a touchscreen.

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