Nowadays, if anything, it's the hardware that justifies buying Apple, and the operating systems are something I can live with. I don't see any compelling reason to use macOS on non-Apple hardware today (except hacking for hackings sake)
just in case anyone is on the fence. Apple’s developer network effects are real and impressive, people updated… nearly everything… so quickly! plus with Rosetta under the hood translations to x86 binaries expand everything runnable to seamlessly
I thought I would miss bootcamo but I dont. I have yet to install ARM Windows but I’m hearing praises about that now from relatively casual users
I used one of their releases rather than building my own image. It’s a guide that merits careful reading, as some key steps are not specifically bulleted. Oh, and it’s not the NixOS graphical installer.
But it was dead simple, and 99% of the heavy lifting is from the Asahi team. The biggest downside is that updating the support files is a manual process, but NixOS of course makes it a breeze to rebuild into a new environment—and back out if it doesn’t work.
It's essentially impossible to repair Apple hardware yourself, but Hackintosh is very easy to maintain in that regard.
I have endless expansion options compared to Apple hardware. Hackintoshes are just a better choice.
Which is typically why your employer who could not give a shit about a $4k expense every five years for an employee costing them a quarter mil annually in total comp opts for them.
Apple Plus is amazing, I broke my macbook and they gave me a loner on the spot and I got it back in full working order later.
I wouldn't buy any Apple product without it. Had a similar experience with an iPhone where they just gave me a new one straight up.
No matter how great it is, that’s a very short amount of time.
It’s a pretty expensive service offering that you have to buy on top of a pretty expensive laptop.
If Apple is not messing up their USB subsystem like they did with Ventura, where people basically had to wait a whole major release until they got stable performance again with Sonoma.
Or if they don’t break iLok copy protection, like they just did with 14.4
And for professional hardware, you don’t have to install “all kinds of alternative drivers”. You just install the one official driver from the hardware vendor and that’s it.
These days I don’t tinker like I used to and mostly just need simple MIDI routing and something that can copy renders from my mixer, so anything will work. I still prefer the ease of MacOS though I can do everything I need to on any OS
[1] the main drawback for Linux was really a lack of good docs for things like PD, and not having access to Live. If I’d had Reaper back then it might have been my daily driver.
I personally just feel that the "futzing" you mention is worse on macOS nowadays than it is on Windows.
And while Windows certainly has its share of issues as well, it's usually transparent and open enough so I can actually fix them. Whereas on macOS, the only course of action is often to just hope and pray Apple will fix what they broke in a future update.
CoreAudio was definitely the better choice when Linux only had JACK, ALSA and PulseAudio, but now that PipeWire exists it's very close to a CoreAudio-esque experience. You can record out of other apps, route processed audio into a voice chat, or manage the world's largest DAC without issue.