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Comment by loughnane | Hacker News Reader

I feel like these posts started popping up with increasing frequency over the last 10 years. At this point its almost a rite of passage to realize that Apple---though good in many ways---is far less than it's cracked up to be.

At least in tech circles.

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Tech circles have never particularly liked Apple. Sometimes they're right; sometimes they're just grumpy that non-techies like things that they don't.

I've been hearing that since before Slashdot dubbed the iPod lame. So I just kinda tune it out and wait to see whether people buy it or not.

I started using Linux in the 1990s, and I flirted with Apple through out the 2010s. I finally switched full time to a Mac Studio this year despite the UI, despite the read-only root and kexts no longer being a thing and inconsistencies and stupid settings app and everything else.

For one, M4 Max is awesome. For two, every other OS is now more annoying to me. Linux is more inconsistent, and the changes being made by major distros make little sense. Windows is a dumpster fire. The BSDs don’t work on anything I own, and the M4 is better anyway. Finally… pricing. For the price of my M4 Mac, there is no PC with as good a spec considering the price of GPUs. RAM and SSD? Yeah, Apple is nearly criminal… but the price of an NVIDIA GPU? Actually kinda criminal.

This says it. Actual "tech" circles were historically not super into the Mac. Of course there were some people who loved it, but the bulk of the classic Mac fanbase was design type people and people who were mostly recreational PC users but had way more money to spend than typical PC users. More hardcore tech folks were turned off by inflexibility and OS instability by the mid-90s.

This has of course changed over the past 20 years as all the OS limitations with the Mac were lifted and all PCs have kind of matured and you don't have massive increases in speed every year. So Apple's better quality, closer price parity, and better software support started to look better and better to actual tech people.

Some of it is that the market has matured - going from not being connected to only connected on a desktop to everywhere on a phone with a real browser was a lot of changes you notice all day.

A child born on the day the first iPhone launched is old enough to vote now.

Many of those posts are being written by people who have been along for that ride, too, so it’s going to be hard to recapture that excitement after experiencing past hot products not changing your life. It’s like a middle aged American buying a new car - yeah, it’s nice but fundamentally nothing changes in your life and you’re never reclaiming the excitement of being 18 and going from marooned in a boring suburb to being able to travel, which is a transformative change even if it was in a clunky old hand-me-down.

Tech circles have been complaining about Apple's mediocrity all the way back to when they were actually mediocre.

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