Fairphone and a Framework is just fine. What exactly do you do that suggests there is no alternative? I can see absolutely nothing Apple does that no other laptop can.
What's the problem with your battery life? Check which app is draining your battery in Activity Monitor/Energy.
Let me check the list.
- High DPI screen with color calibration and automatic white balancing, working 99% of the time. Ensuring your eyes always sees the color it expects without fatigue. Plus, HDR.
- Most decent external screens you plug will also have their correct color profile installed on the OS level, so they'll not show funny colors.
- 15+ hour battery life on an ordinary laptop if you don't abuse it. Even my M1 can handle me for a couple of days with light usage.
- Good quality speakers, decent stereo separation without being too tinny or boomy.
- Great quality cameras and microphones for its size.
- Great, backlight illuminated keyboard, with no flex.
- A realistic 8-10 year usage life without babying it.
- A full metal body, and keeping it light for that amount of metal.
- Built-in biometrics which runs on a proper secure enclave, without any "touch here, write absurdly long pasword you don't know there" shenanigans of Windows.
- A POSIX compliant, BSD descendant OS which can interoperate with Linux way better than Windows.
- A proper backup system which backs up whole OS and system state to an external drive, better than old "Windows 7 backup" and miles better than new "OneDrive only Windows Backup".
- Better radios, backend and port bandwidth than its class-equivalent machines. Essentially a loaded MacBook Pro is equivalent to a Z-Workstation Mobile from HP.
...and these are standard in almost every MacBook. I don't go through hoops to beg local distributors to build the machine I like via their configuration wizard, and wait them to import it if they feel like it, and pay 3x of its sticker price because it's a one off import tucked inside a bigger shipment. Even CTO devices by Apple are shipped in a week and comes to my door in another 1-2. I pay the sticker price for the device I want.
Do you need more?
Sent from my Linux desktop system.
What about the overall quality of the software and hardware being rather poor? No repair-ability, a limited OS now, low quality glass covering the screens, lack of long term support for many laptops now?
The quality of the software is same or better as Linux (because getting all your Linux desktop and command line software running is a brew install away).
The hardware is class leading. The screens are best in class. The laptops will last you 8-10 years and then you can install a Linux on them and keep them going for another 5.
Yes, repairability is poor, but improving.
I get why people make other choices, but the idea that Apple hardware is poor quality and the software is terrible just isn't the way to do it. Argue about purity of freedom, argue about cost (Apple hardware is expensive, because it's superb), argue about crappy dev account policies like the thread is here to support.
But, y'know, don't just make up stuff anybody who uses this stuff daily knows is just made up...
Repairability is non existant, a battery and some ports is not anything to shout about.
I have used Macs since the early 90's when they were repairable, pretty much consistently and I still have to on occassion but they have dropped the ball on every aspect. From the late 90's repairability and innovation have gone downhill. The late 00's to the early 10's brought it back and ever since then bar the odd thing that is pretty but less practical, just look at the touch bar and the removal of ports.
I have had Thinkpads, ZBooks, and other laptops such as Lets Note easily as long as a macbook and yes some of the pretty may be missing but that isn't what I focus on in devices.
On the simulation performance, you came to the right place, because I'll be developing a BEM code for material simulation. I can test it on both M series and on a cluster and see how big the gap is. Intel based Macs were pretty on par with their server siblings. I expect to be able extract similar performance from M based systems with some tight coding.
If you believe that Asahi's changes won't distilled to mainstream Linux, you're mistaken. Marcan might have fought with the kernel devs, but somebody will carry these changes in another form sooner or later. Macs wont't be Asahi or MacOS only systems for long. I think you can understand this better than me, because as far as I understand, we're using these things called computers for a similar amount of time.
BTW, you're citing Thinkpads and Z-Books which are the two machine classes which can claim some parity with MacBooks. They are the same class machines basically, so you have some bias in your views. This is what I cited as "I have to beg the local distributors to...". So getting an equivalent Z-Book or Thinkpad is not 10x harder, but at least 3x more expensive for a similar configuration.
Speedy failures of several tousand units when they are selling millions. + having it repaired is not a dreadful experience as with other PC makers (have horrendous experiences with HP, Asus and LG).
Multiscore? Sure, the laptop that sounds overshadows my robot vacuum can do slightly more work in a short timespan, id rather not have to deal with uncomnfortable temperatures when its just sitting on a desktop, doing who knows what (probably not indexing my files, as the search function just have no idea the file I opened 20x in the last 2 weeks exists). Which bring us to software: is it more closed and do I hate it for it? Sure. Is it worse overall? Not a chance.
Repairability is "bring it to an applestore and possibly come out with a new device right away, or wait a week. Miles ahead than any other brand. Sure, you can change the battery yourself, but you either get shafted for oem battery, or wonder why that cheap battery from shady shop runs just as bad as your old one. What good is repairing 5 year old HP thats breaking apart, overheating at idle, with screen burning out, hinges having a play, with speakers of a joke quality, with so many bad memories, when you can have non-repaired 10 year old macbook and it still feel like new.
For work I have windows machine because I need to use windows apps, but at home I am m1 macbook air (costing less than 1/4 of my zbook workstation), and apart from raw power its better in every. single. way.
...if you have AppleCare. If you don't, repairing a broken Macbook display will cost more than buying your dog leukemia medication.
Ask how I found out!
Linux exists and improved a ton in the last two decades. It's great and is my primary OS, but macOS is not an imitation of Linux, by any stretch.
Tell me a backup solution which allows you plug your drive to a brand new computer, get a coffee and resume from the point you left, literally incl. open apps, documents, window positions, volume level, and even the playing song. I'm trying to contribute Back in Time in Linux and know Borg exists, but all of them are filling different roles. Windows / LLVM / BTRFS / ZFS snapshots are a thing but, none of them are easy to use by the layman.
"Low quality glass" issue exposed in 2014, and it's not "low quality glass", but "fragile coating" issue, and I believe it's due to harsh handling of the glass. Because, I have an 2008, 2014 and 2020 MacBooks. 2008 has an old fashioned matte screen, and 2014 and 2020 MacBook's screen coatings are almost spotless. They both have a single short line in the middle due to an oily key burned the coating because I didn't clean my keyboard and somehow pressed the machines so the keys made contact.
If you use an alcohol free screen cleaner (which is dirt cheap here) or a camera lens cleaning solution, with a clean cloth (e.g. the one Apple provides inside the box), you can't damage the screen. Of course, Apple can go above and beyond and use fluorine coatings on these screens (which are used in high end camera lenses), which will easily double the price of the whole machine.
I agree on the repairability, but I'll note something else: dependability. None of my Macs needed any service. 2014 one needs a new battery after 10 years, and that's acceptable. One friend managed to fry their MacBook Air by abusing it a bit with AI workloads, but it's fixed under warranty for manufacturing error. I know ~20 people with Macs, and nobody except two (who both emptied a mug coffee on their keyboards) needed a service.
Also, on the iPhone side, if you send your phone in for battery replacement, any damaged part of your phone will be replaced free of charge if there's no external damage on that part. Apple changed my speaker for free on my iPhone, because they found its performance subpar. No info, no questions asked. "We changed your battery and speaker. You only pay for battery. Enjoy your phone, have a nice day". That's good service if you ask me, and the phone returned in a condition that nobody could tell that thing was opened and its battery replaced. The phone was out of warranty for 2 years when that happened.
On the OS side, there's no real limitation except you need to enable external kernel modules via recovery menu, and if we're talking about SIP, praising Nix and immutable systems and loathing macOS SIP is hypocrisy, so there's that.
On the reliability of macOS underpinnings, that laptop is up for 60 days (because of an update induced reboot), and it never crashes and fragments its memory so nothing works. So, I don't know if that this is not reliable, what is.
By long term, you mean 7 years? Heck, you can't even get 7 years of support and spare parts for enterprise hardware unless you pay an arm and a leg (don't ask me how I know), and Apple gives you 7 years of HW/SW support for anything they build. How this is not LTS?
While I agree that Pipewire works great and pretty transparently for single channel capture and multichannel playback, I don't know what happens when you add a 6 channel audio interface and start recording on all of them at the same time.
What happens with 6 channels? You just connect them where you want and it works.
Unfortunately I no longer have my primary desktop (Linux) system, and no external audio interface to play with at the office.
If I can borrow something from my friends, I'd love try to give Pipewire another go.
Macs are "good" for audio, because audio people tend to do nonsense with their softwares (a lot of pirated stuff that they don't even know how to install properly) and macOS makes it harder to put the system in a problematic state.
But it doesn't have that many advantages in comparison to a well-managed system apart from some specific audio utilities (that can be quite useful/good, that much I can agree with).
In other words, Macs are good for noobs, and the stereotype of Apple users being pretty bad with computers is usually not completely wrong (the average Windows user isn't better really but they are not so narcissistic and arrogant about their choice of computers).
So, having 2 samples of latency in most cases is way better than having 1 sample latency in some cases. Esp, for non-computer people, as you say.
Back then, on Linux, JACK provided a clunky setup, but a better experience latency/flexibility-wise w.r.t. Windows. Now Pipewire is probably way better (w.r.t. JACK), but I'm not recording anymore.
Mind you, macOS is not my primary OS of choice. I only prefer it for my portables because of the hardware it implies, and the OS's BSD heritage. On the other hand, I don't believe neither in "everybody shall know computers inside out", nor I stereotype people according the OS they choose to drive daily.
Both are bullshit, like you prefer to say.
Otherwise, you actually use the generic HID (Human Interface Device) implementation which has a 16bits/96khz sample rate limitation along with many other limitations, depending on variables (interface speed, specification etc.).
It's better than what Windows had by default back in the days but at the same time it wasn't THAT good. But the "genius" of it is that for most people it was a seamless plug-and-play experience since the vast majority of Mac users are actually amateurs dabbling in the stuff. So, for "basic" needs, it suffices to pick up a "good enough" interface, connect it, and you are on your way. But if you use a professional level interface, like something from RME for example, you will definitely need to install the drivers and configure the thing properly and it doesn't work worse on Windows. The "advantage" of Mac OS X was that you could potentially get away with a cheaper interface and use the good enough implementation instead of having to buy expensive hardware, but that's a bit of a lie/stretch because you are not getting the same quality/experience at all. But this is usual with Apple aficionados, they are very fluid with reality, distortion field is no joke.
Yes, Linux has become pretty good with audio, but realistically it's more trouble than it's worth for most people. Whether you buy a Mac or a Windows PC, the license cost of the system is pretty negligible but access to specific softwares and support is extremely important. This is actually, in my opinion, the single best reason to get a Mac for audio: all the indie software that you get access to, that are often extremely good and does not have true equivalency on Windows.
Of course, I don't think that people should know their computers inside-out, what I'm pointing is that in general Windows users get by just fine, sometimes doing mistakes or having trouble because of poor choices they misunderstood but they are generally very chill about it. Mac users on the other hand are almost systematically convinced that they use the best thing around and that they know better when in fact they are rarely competent enough to understand properly but have a very large ego.
Personally, macOS used to be my OS of choice and I think it still is very good in many ways. But it has also stagnated too much, made too "secure" and more closed like iOS and Apple's behavior in general is just abhorrent. The Mac is still good mostly because of various exclusive softwares that are very good (which is why Apple should treat their devs much better, they largely underestimate their importance) and the hardware for laptops that is indeed quite good and unmatched if we forget about value.
> Otherwise, you actually use the generic HID (Human Interface Device) implementation which has a 16bits/96khz sample rate limitation along with many other limitations, depending on variables (interface speed, specification etc.).
I currently have an audio interface with 32bits/96kHz which never needed any special drivers, it runs flawlessly without any latency whatsoever, plug-and-play.
https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/Audio2_with_Errata_a...
Version 4 is in the works, not sure what/how much is implemented in which OS.
My point still stands (even more), if you have such low requirement for your audio, the OS really doesn't matter, you can be fine with an iPad or Android tablet even. If you really are working somewhat professionally with a pro level audio interface, you are installing the drivers regardless of native driverless support, rendering the "advantage" of macOS rather moot.
Audio latency in DAWs is more related to processing power than purely to the audio interface capacity. People get confused because some audio interfaces actually have accelerators in them that offload some of the audio processing from the CPU to allow for lower latency (because of lower buffer size). However, those are very expensive and have become extremely rare with the massive increase in computing power (as well as explosion of cores, allowing each VST to have its own thread) so it's not something most need to be concerned about.
There is however a performance delta depending on the driver implementation and DAW software of choice. It's in the single digit ms range but it still exists. The good thing is that as usual, more expensive is often better and you would only care about that if you are really professional, meaning you already buy the expensive stuff for many other reasons.
Here is some reading if you wish to educate yourself. On latency: https://www.original.dawbench.com/audio-int-lowlatency.htm On the funny idea that Macs are inherently better for audio: https://original.dawbench.com/win7-v-osx-1.htm Make sure to use the part links in the bottom right corner to get the full story.
There are many reasons to like and use Macs but anytime someone pretends it's for performance I get the hick, having been confronted to precisely the reverse. Both my own experience with Hackintoshes (and comparable PC hardware to Intel Macs) and many experiences supporting musician/recording technicians in studios, there is no real performance reason to use macOS, quite the contrary. People use it DESPITE the mediocre performance, because it allows them to use other tools that make more difference than just a little bit more performance.
> In other words, Macs are good for noobs, and the stereotype of Apple users being pretty bad with computers is usually not completely wrong (the average Windows user isn't better really but they are not so narcissistic and arrogant about their choice of computers).
There is extreme value in making the computer do something extremely well without having to care about "properly managing it", you are leaning towards a "No True Scotsman" situation, audio professionals might be noobs with computers, to the point where learning yet another skill just to have a functioning setup is not worth it if there's another solution on the market that doesn't require it.
The stereotype of Mac users being bad with computers is... Well, just a stereotype. The difference being: Linux requires you to be good with computers, there's no other option, if you aren't you simply cannot keep a well-managed system, that won't ever have mass appeal.
There are some applications with no Linux equivalent, but it's not a MacOS problem, it's a development effort problem.
Other things are good, but radios are wired. Even the latest mbps still can't switch the AP transparently - no mesh support at all it seems.
Interesting.
Are you running the latest firmware on the TP-Links? I remember their meshes being wonky regardless of the connecting client in the early days.
One of the reasons I use macOS is I get to inspect how they do some things. I carry the experience to Linux via the small tools I develop. Apple is one of the last "purveyors of magic" when it comes to user interfaces, and studying them, iterating on them and implementing them is both a good learning experience. Also, it feels nice when something you write (with a GPL license no less) has the same magic feeling of frictionless productivity.
Wish more people worked on them, and OS were designed to accommodate accessibility technologies better.
It's a shame that drag-lock is not on by default. It makes life much easier.
My wife swears by the Magic Mouse. I love the idea of a mouse that you can make gestures on, but it doesn't fit well in my palm. I have huge hands. It's just too flat and it hurts my hand. Now, my wife has a backup one in case the battery dies.