Hacker News Reader

Comment by mostlysimilar | Hacker News Reader

Windows makes sense, but can you elaborate on macOS? To me macOS feels like it just gets out of the way. It'd be nice if it didn't come preinstalled with Apple's first party stuff like Music or whatever, but you tell those things to go away and they go away. Contrast with Windows where not only does it include third party trash, but truly extricating yourself involves changing registry things and fighting it the whole way.

View on HN

Having to do a multi step dance to run a binary I downloaded with the intent to run (cause ya know it's a program) irks me to no end. SIP is a nightmare I have to fight to disable on every update, gatekeeper logs all my program launches and sends that data to apple. The list goes on and on. Essentially you can't use a Mac as a computer without learning multiple convoluted multi-step processes to do basic things like running a program and even then it's all being logged and sent to the mother ship in the name of "security."

I wholeheartedly agree with you, this drives me nuts.

Yeah, this is how you realize fanboyism is nuts. As much as I loved the openness of original Mac OS X and its straightforward management, modern macOS is a pain in the ass for so many "advanced" interactions that I think it is questionnable if it's worth the trouble (before talking about other costs).

It feels nostalgic but I kinda hate doing many things on macOS nowadays. If you don't need Mac only software, it's probably best to use something else considering the hardware costs.

Uh, you can't just make Apple's first-party apps go away. I have a Mac Mini for the express purpose of validating cross-platform code, and I've noticed that you can't delete a lot of the Apple software, be it Music, TV, or FaceTime. I have no use for any of them, but Apple forces them to stay on your Mac.

Normally we call this sort of stuff "bloatware."

Oh you're right, I thought you could delete them because you can delete the media creation apps (GarageBand, iMovie, etc.)

Have you ever tried to delete Chess?

But you don’t have to use them

you can't use whatever external monitor you have, because you need specific dpi ratio to make scaling works, otherwise blurry screen, because apple only do things for their hardware.

you can't charge keyboard/trackpad (and probably a lot of other stuff) with (some, or most) non-apple blessed chargers. i was unable to charge the trackpad fully, even in a week; had it constantly connected to charger, couldn't connect to mbp as the mbp had only usb-c ports. after few warranty replacements, someone asked me what charger i'm using, so i've tested the usb-c -> usb-a adapter and connected the trackpad/keyboard to the mbp. it charged fully, and the battery didn't died in few hours. after that i've returned/give away all apple-made accessories. fuck that hostility

> you need specific dpi ratio to make scaling works, otherwise blurry screen

And last time I checked, there were 4 (four) external monitors in the entire world that could render a Mac without blurriness. So the vast majority of people using a dock with their MacBook are looking at a blurry mess.

All because Apple didn't want to maintain subpixel antialiasing.

Yeah, this drives me nuts, this is insanely user hostile and greedy behavior at once. At the same time, they push you to buy their overpriced hardware (with limited availability/options) but if you dare buy not enough of it, they fuck you over with a reduced display quality even though they had a decently working solution before and it couldn't have costed that much to maintain.

I don't care for a laptop and their desktop offering is either absurdly overpriced (Studio Display) or way too underpowered for the price (iMac).

In a way, that makes it easier to not want anything from them, because nowadays on non-retina display, I actually prefer the font rendering coming out of Windows that whatever macOS is doing.

Apple's just slicker at conning you.

It's actually more inflexible than Windows.

It only "gets out of the way" once you've been brainwashed into doing everything the way Apple thinks you should.

And surprise, surprise the "right way" involves not using anything where they don't get a cut.

Why do you say this about Windows? I was previously a macOS only user for a long time but now almost solely use Windows 11 because it mostly does what I tell it and that's it. You can set up the thing very easily to ignore pretty much all the Microsoft shenanigans and also configure it in a way that it knows you are an advanced user and won't bother you with the little things. I just restarted yesterday after a 16 days uptime and that's just because I felt like it, it was running just fine otherwise.

I really don't know why people have this opinion of modern Windows because that just doesn't match reality.

I don't like how Apple/macOS chooses to degrade non-Apple-or-blessed-brands of devices from working well. e.g. Use of YPbPr for displays rather than RGB data, SBC codec for Bluetooth, and the like. Apple users are a means to an end.

They actively removed (or refused to add) options that made common hardware (mouse) easy to use, that felt horrible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com