I too don’t value my time very highly.
The author says he lives in Europe, taking the laptop out fir repairs can easily take an entire afternoon of travel that could be spent more productively elsewhere.
Pick the best tools for the job. Sometimes that involves spending a couple thousand extra for a shiny Macbook, sometimes that involves spending an afternoon setting up a Thinkpad.
I'm not sure if you understand how urbanised Europe is.
That's fine when you're laser focused on your career and are in 'career as personality' part of your life, which is essential imo and I'm not sneering at it by making reference to it in that way.
But ultimately, I now need to get to my desk just on time, know my machine will work and not just be an opportunity cost sink, and get what I've scheduled done and then clock off when I need to.
Now, that can happen with custom bits and tinkery bobs, but I'd much rather have the insurance policy of using what I personally have experienced as the most solid and reliable hardware/software combo in the business and not concern myself with the other stuff, even if sometimes it's more fun. I work on a 13" 2013 mbp i7/16g ram and 2021 13" m1 / 16gig ram and have never had a single issue with either that cost me work time. Having to install more stuff to then claim "it just works" isn't just working, it's adding more "oh it now doesn't work for some esoteric reason" to the chain.
Except Pop!_OS 22.04 worked entirely out of the box. I didn't need to even open the terminal to do anything except clone my repos.
Apple clearly has no love for power users for over half a decade, and thinking of going to windows after MacOS is a nonstarter, which really leaves the obvious choice being migration to linux until you start to seriously evaluate PC laptops along with realizing you're taking the onus of OS configuration on yourself ALONG WITH your work, as the previous commenter mentioned. That said, Ventura is such a bad MacOS release (and sign of things to come) that Apple has finally made it the pull off the band-aid moment for a lot of power user folks like the writer of the article, issues be damned. good -enough- will have to suffice.
It's so tiresome that every single release of MacOS has fewer features professionals actually care about.
- worst window management than on any other OS
- mouse scrolling works in a different direction and requires additional software to be fixed.
- unlike windows, cannot even connect to Android without some additional software to copy pictures.
- docker is extremely slow
- my M1 already crashed 4 times in the last 6 months since I started using it - worse than any other OS/hardware.
- poor multi-monitor support
- poor support of monitors with lower resolution
- non-standard keyboard shortcuts. All other OSes use the same shortcuts.
- brew is very buggy when used with multiple users on single laptop
- no way to configure a global variable on startup. You can use .zprofile etc. but this will not work with GUI applications started via spotlight.
this is only a small portion of issues I had with macos.
You can change that in system preferences easily with a checkbox.
> non-standard keyboard shortcuts. All other OSes use the same shortcuts.
You could also argue that these shortcuts are standard to apple computers for decades and so are standard for their ecosystem.
Not disagreeing with most of your points, but thought i'd just point those out.
hurry up, you'll keep the President and Secretary-General waiting!