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Comment by dt2m | Hacker News Reader

It's so crazy how big the divide between Apple's software and hardware is getting. They're putting out the best hardware ever - by a huge margin - and yet their own internal software quality is going down the drain, fast.

The one thing Mac OS X got right in 2001 was consistency and predictability. When you learned how the UI worked in one app, it was almost guaranteed to behave the same in other apps.

Now today, we have this mess of Catalyst apps, SwiftUI apps, old Cocoa apps, and even worse, Electron apps.

Scroll speed and behaviour is inconsistent across all of them.

Drag-and-drop support, once a hallmark of the Mac UI, is spotty at best.

Even basic stuff breaks every once in a while. It's wild to consider that Apple literally wrote the book[1] on how to provide a consistent experience for an entire OS, and yet they don't seem to be able to follow it themselves anymore.

[1]: http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf

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> The one thing Mac OS X got right in 2001 was consistency and predictability.

Compared to earlier Mac OS, it wasn’t, by a huge margin. Mac OS X was a weird mix of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS, with inconsistent text editing (for example, it had both control-a and command-left arrow to move the cursor to the beginning of a line, working depending on what framework the app was written in, and “page up” might or might not move the selection hor is that a Windows vs Mac thing?)), file name weirdness (Mac OS allowed ‘/’ inside file names and disallowed ‘:’, for NeXTSTEP, it was the other way around. Somehow, the two had to meet on disk), different text layout engines, a desktop UI that tried to be both a file system browser and a classic Mac OS Finder and didn’t quite know whether to use filename extensions or type/creator codes, and to top it off, a Unix CLI merged in.

That's actually a great point. I was coming from Windows at that point in time and the contrast alone in UI consistency was huge. But then again, it seems like the MS mantra has always been 'anything goes' when it comes to UI.

Maybe I'm just having my "old man yells at cloud" moment and I'm annoyed things are changing.

>They're putting out the best hardware ever - by a huge margin

... not really. They basically put phone processors into laptops because they realized that most people use their laptops exactly like they use their phones.

The new M1/M2 machines have ever so slightly higher single core performance, comparable multi core performance, and when you run them full tilt, the battery doesn't last that long and they start thermal throttling. The only time their battery lasts long is when you use them like phones. Its a neat use case for sure, but nothing ground breaking.

On top of everything, monitors are still at 60hz, external monitor support is shit especially without a dedicated hdmi port, and repairability is a joke.

Apple has, is, and always will be a jewelry manufacturer.

I'm writing this comment from a 16" M1 Max MacBook Pro, which is hands down the best laptop I've ever used, also for high-performance workloads. I prefer using Mac OS but I'm not married to the OS by any means, and if it was the other way around I'd be switching to some Lenovo + Linux combo. There's no denying that ARM is a much better architecture for any device that has power constraints. Add Apple's vertical integration, and you have a winner on your hands.

Granted, for desktops, x86-64 still has a lead in performance, but it's impossible to max out an Intel-powered laptop for more than 2 hours on battery power. Getting close to that level of performance, but without the horrible fan noise and burning lap is much more preferable to me.

The entire Pro lineup - laptops, tablets and phones - all have 120Hz displays. I would fault them for releasing the 60Hz Studio Display, but it is literally impossible to source a 5K panel with higher refresh rates at this time of writing.

External monitor support being shit - honestly not my experience, but OK - is more likely to be a byproduct of limited USB-C bandwidth, which you can work around using Thunderbolt docks or the built-in HDMI port. I will agree that Windows handles multiple monitors much better than Mac OS though.

I'd imagine if Apple really wanted LG or somebody to manufacture a 5K 120Hz panel if they wanted.

For some reason Mac OS still doesn't support MST. A $400 Steam Deck with 1 USB C port can handle multiple 1080p monitors natively with a $30 adapter but a $1200 M2 Air can't do it (even though it has 2 video out capable USB C ports) without resorting to a limited more expensive solution like DisplayLink or Airplay.

This just isn’t true. I have a full development setup on my M1 Pro 14”, VSCode, Docker running multiple instances of Postgres, Redis, and RabbitMQ. Edge with more tabs than I can shake a stick at because of my ADHD, and worst of all - Microsoft Teams.

I easily get a 12-14 hour battery life on this setup, and that’s with YouTube videos also playing in the background intermittently.

Back when I had the M1 Air, I had less concurrency due to memory limitations but even better battery life, these CPUs are insanely efficient.

Everybody’s mileage will vary, but this is a powerhouse development machine, to suggest otherwise is silly.

Im not going too much into detail because fighting against the obvious pro apple bias on here is pointless, but you can read plenty of reports about lower battery life given more load, screen brightness, e.t.c. Keep in mind that just because you are "running" stuff, if a thread/process sits idle without interaction, its drawing minimal cpu load.

And yes, the M1/M2 is definitely more efficient given sparse loads, but its not groundbreaking in any sense because phones have been like this for quite some time. Take a bone stock android phone without any apps, leave it on for a day without use, and you will come back to minimal battery drain.

> The new M1/M2 machines have ever so slightly higher single core performance, comparable multi core performance, and when you run them full tilt, the battery doesn't last that long and they start thermal throttling. The only time their battery lasts long is when you use them like phones. Its a neat use case for sure, but nothing ground breaking.

As an owner of many Macs over the years, including both Intel and M1 MacBook Pros, I agree that Apple silicon is not ground breaking, but I disagree with the characterization and think it's missing the advantages of the M1, which I've seen firsthand.

The battery life is improved, because M1 is much more power efficient than Intel. And there's less need for thermal throttling in the first place, because M1 runs a lot cooler than Intel chips.

I've compiled large software projects using these machines, and the M1 Macs are definitely faster, significantly. I'd say the performance increase from Intel to M1 is comparable to that from the PPC to Intel switch. Maybe that is "ground breaking"? I don't know, depends on your standard.

[EDIT] I really think the comment about so-called "phone processors" is unfortunate because (as usual, sigh) the discussion under the top comment on HN is going way off on an irrelevant tangent, completely ignoring the linked article.

Personally - I think it's interesting that the M1 chip might actually be better than the M2 stuff coming out now, given the thermal profiles of the M2 chips aren't as good.

I would take that as a bad sign for Apple - at a minimum, it seems like they're under-investing in chassis design to account for the heat output of the M2 chips, and it's a shame. As a worst case, it indicates that the design for these chips might have hit a local optima very quickly, and there isn't much space to push the envelope with future iterations.

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