Just get a MacBook Air.
It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop).
Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.
It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop).
Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.
> 1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software.
and Apple in general is the chief abuser of this user freedom, less so on Mac devices, but extremely so on iPhone/iOS devices: it allows to run only vetted software, often against the interests of the users, and, in some cases, retroactively altering the deals [0], so "doing a market research" prior to buying the device, as many regular HN users suggest, won't really help.
[0]: Pray they don't alter it any further.
Now I'm thinking about Android phone, as my iPhone 8 started to throttle and I think it's time to upgrade.
PS it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.
Please, let's not act like this is a real solution. It's definitely better than not having that option at all, but:
- 99.5% of users don't even know it exists or how to do it because it's intentionally hidden away
- Because of the above fact, it's generally not viable to develop an application that can only be sideloaded, anything that gets removed from the Play Store usually dies
- Google has recently been moving away from the traditional APK format and towards their new "split APK" structure meaning you cannot sideload apps that were downloaded from the Play Store without a third party app to handle it
They had that choice, and they've chosen not to. This, on one hand, keeps you from side-loading 2GIS, but on the other hand, keeps seniors' iPhones from crapware (as per TLA).
> That's not the problem with Android
The wider problem is what will happen when your side-loaded APK will need to make a TLS connection to 2GIS website, but its TLS certificate has been declared invalid by the cert authority (because sanctions). Or what will happen when the BGP routing protocol will direct the traffic to 2GIS website to go to a sinkhole (because sanctions). Or what will happen when 2GIS web servers from HP and Dell will be rendered inoperable by a remote command (because sanctions).
> it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.
No doubt Linux, OpenOffice, and RISC-V will be of tremendous help to Putin's Russia.
The crapware they install is from the official app store, not "sideloaded" apps.
This way Apple could comply with sanctions, removing the app from the AppStore, and not causing their users any real harm.
This would also allow users in China to use messaging apps like Signal.
Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.
But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.
All in all I like my Mac better than my Windows PC or Linux laptop, but Apple software is just regressing a bit slower than the others.
`sudo spctl --master-disable`
Turning off Gatekeeper also turns off the notarization checks.
Of course, us software engineers usually buy very expensive computers! The end result is that the average software will always run slowly on the average hardware, forever, no matter how fast hardware gets.
It’s a tragedy and I hate it. I feel like software engineers need “slow CPU thursdays” or something, where every Thursday your cpu is intentionally throttled down to run at the speed of a below average user’s computer. If we don’t feel our user’s pain, we will never understand it.
(Though this would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow. Hm! I wonder how you’d implement that!)
Well, a slow compiler means you write less code and pull in fewer dependencies to solve a problem, win-win ;)
Now I understand that Apple just works when Windows/Android often don't, and iOS/MacOS are generally more user-friendly for non-tech people.
I’ve gotten probably $10k worth of repairs for free across my apple devices. I’ve even purchased broken apple devices in warranty to walk them to the Apple Store to walk out with new hardware.
Linux gives you full customizability on the other hand, but it's not for everybody (yes, in theory there are some very simple and usable distros, but in practice users often need software that is not available on them, like Office).
It feels like theft when a windows laptop is advertised based on its CPU, except when you take it out of the box 60% of that cpu is consumed all the time with some terrible HP bloatware or something. What an utterly terrible experience.
For some others it works (for instance Numbers and GarageBand). The randomness (why can some preinstalled apps be uninstalled, but other not) is pretty close to a dark pattern.
The uninstallable apps on macOS also are never required to have open and running. So yea, it's 4 or 5 extra items in your main ~/Applications folder, but that seems like a small price to pay for all of the other benefits.
None of the extra Apple apps do anything unless you run them, so the worst case they take some storage and mental space (when you see them in your Applications folder). And they're obviously included because Apple thinks they're actually useful to enough people, even if you disagree.
As for hardware failures, again, good for you. Here it's more like 3-4 days before getting it fixed or replaced.