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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

I've got an iPhone, iPad, and MBA. In an abstract sense -- that is, all other things equal -- I'd like to swap them out for non-Apple products. I dislike Apple's software, their entire "magic/creative/yadda-yadda-yadda" branding, and of course their price tag.

But the app ecosystem and hardware to me seem absolutely incomparable. I can't see myself ever switching my phone or tablet because it seems as though iOS apps are just unapproachably better than Android counterparts -- and there aren't any laptops as functional and, yes, straight-up pretty as the MacBook Air.

(The reason the author cited for switching from Apple was two failed laptops. For what it's worth, my previous laptop -- a Dell -- broke every six months or so. [I had four-year insurance, thankfully, and replaced it once the insurance ran out.]

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I would ditch Apple in a heartbeat if I felt that anyone could provide a similar hardware experience. I'm not just talking about CPU/RAM/Graphics card (yes, I know I can get a slightly better deal with non-Apple hardware), but everything else as well. Apple displays are beautiful and completely free of defects, Apple trackpads are incredible, the computers are ridiculously thin (my new ThinkPad is twice as thick as my MBP), the battery life is incredible (my early 2013 MBP gets 5-6 hours, new MBPs get 10-12 hours), etc. The hardware is just great. I don't understand why no one else can make hardware like this.

Re. failed laptops: I had to take my last MBP in for repair something like 8 times in 6 months. Totally unacceptable. Most of the time it was for something they botched during the last repair. However, Apple gave me store credit for the purchase price of the laptop and then some, so I'm happy. I do beat the shit out of my laptops, so I'm sure someone who was more gentle would have better luck.

> I would ditch Apple in a heartbeat...

Why would you ditch it in a heartbeat if you think that:

- Apple displays are beautiful and completely free of defects

- Apple trackpads are incredible

- Apple computers are ridiculously thin

- The battery life is incredible

- The hardware is just great

---

It's like saying I would ditch my wife in a heartbeat, but her face is super pretty, her body is perfect and her heart is a heart of angel...but I would still ditch her in a heartbeat...

Maybe you and your wife have fundamental differences in beliefs about how people should live their lives?

Pretty sure the problem is what he is describing is purely the hardware, but doesn't equate that with a heart of gold. What he's saying is that she's beautiful, but he doesn't like her personality.

Basically, he's ditching her because he's not superficial.

Because I often feel impeded by the partially closed nature of OS X and the extremely closed nature of iOS.

At leat on mobile, android seems to suffer from high latencies

> - Apple displays are beautiful and completely free of defects

Guess that depends on whether you get the Samsung panel or the LG panel.

As for developers, where are are the matte displays?

> As for developers, where are are the matte displays?

And floppy disks

What's a better screen for reading?

One with reflections on it, or one without?

This is no laughing matter for programmers who stare at a screen for hours.

I agree, although I’ve noticed that the Retina screen is coated with something that makes it far less reflective than the older glossy screens.

The Thinkpad T440s I just got is great, 14" 1080p IPS matte display, though on the forums there is apparently some talk of there being two different panels where one of them is significantly worse than the other. As a first time Thinkpad buyer, I'm completely in love with this machine. It only took two days for me to become unable to use other laptops because I kept trying to find the trackpoint, lol.

The Thinkpads are awesome, except now you can't take them into any important State Department buildings. Lucky for me, that's not a concern.

> my new ThinkPad is twice as thick as my MBP

how much did you pay for the thinkpad and how much did you pay for MBP? i doubt that your MBP is thiner than the Lenovo Carbon X1

I switched from ipods and ipod touches to android and I can't really see myself going back any time soon because of the ability to tweak and customize android. I don't miss any apps from ios and I don't think I have ever felt like an android app was worse than an ios version.

I'm of the same mind. I switched from the iPhone to Android because I was dissatisfied with the tiny iPhone screens, but I expected a quality drop-off in apps.

The drop-off, in the instances where it does exist, is not nearly as dramatic as advertised. It's pretty small, really, which has me looking at switching my tablet from iPad to an Android tablet as well.

Plus, on Android, I have a browser with functioning plug-ins (Firefox). iOS's app ecosystem doesn't seem so great when it fails so dramatically at perhaps the most important app: web browser.

It's like switching from real orange juice to Fanta. Some people won't notice, and some people will like it better.

The problem with Android isn't the OS, it's the stupid number of hardware configurations possible that make fine-tuning the application to the screen virtually impossible. Most applications, even the best, are still rough around the edges compared to their iOS counterparts.

If you want tweaking and customizing, Android is the only way to go.

>I dislike Apple's software

In what sense? Does it run slow? Does it not give you enough options?

I've used Linux on and off, from RedHat 5 (circa '97) to the latest Ubuntu. Heck, I've even worked with CDE and such on Sun and HP boxes before Linux. Have also used Windows.

Besides political reasons, I haven't seen anything compelling enough to move over. I have all my commercial software (from Adobe to MS and beyond), I have most UNIX cli stuff, and if I want hardcode unixy stuff I can do it an a VM with Vagrant (as I would on a Linux system anyway, why pollute my desktop with project specific dev installations?).

I've tried Gimp -- it's no match for Photoshop, and I prefer Pixelmator and Acorn for lightweight stuff. I also try Open Office every couple of years -- it remains mostly as it was 15 years ago, and has added cruft and slowlyness to it (why it needs a JRE I don't even...). Pages, Numbers and Keynote are fine for my needs -- the only time I need something more it's when I need more MS Office compatibility, and there OO doesn't cut it either.

I also dabble in multimedia, and nothing on OSS comes close to Logic and FCPX. And I've been keeping an eye on the DAW space in Linux since before there was Jack and ALSA. Heck, even Mail.app has no much of a competition. If you like clunky, you can go for Thunderbird.

>The reason the author cited for switching from Apple was two failed laptops. For what it's worth, my previous laptop -- a Dell -- broke every six months or so.

I never understand this reasoning. Don't people understand that there are faulty shipments in all production runs? I've had AMD CPUs overheat, IBM disk drives fails, Toshiba laptops crap out, etc. I've also had Apple stuff die on me. Those things happen.

I don't know. Mail.app does a lot of things that are pretty nonsensical. It's easily the buggiest OS X app that I use b y about 10 to 1. I'm not saying Thunderbird is an alternative though. For all the grief that Microsoft deserves, Outlook is far and away the best mail application I've ever used, baring stupid quirks of PST/OST files (especially when it comes to Calendar). That's like the one application that Microsoft has completely nailed.

I WISH there were a better alternative.

Is there a reason browser-based doesn't work for you? I moved to gmail only a few years ago and haven't looked back.

I'm trying to move away from Google services. I've had gmail accounts a long time, but am moving towards self-hosting.

Such services can be alright for low-use personal email. Where they break down and where Outlook excels is high volumes of mail.

I've had jobs where between automated emails from server monitors, lists I was on and the high volume of discussion we had dropped 900-1200 emails in my Inbox every day. Outlook is the only application that makes that manageable...and I can save all of my mail and quickly search and access all of it.

> Besides political reasons, I haven't seen anything compelling enough to move over.

apt-get to install practically any open source software in the world is one.

Partially as a consequence of that, but other stuff as well, the development experience for those using the console and not an IDE is far better on Linux than OS X or (by far) Windows.

Finally, the "political" stuff you mention is not politics for sake of politics. It stems from very practical real-world things. For example, if I write an app and calling a system library does something unexpected, I can read the source code to see exactly what is going on. That's not possible, generally speaking, on OS X or Windows. Open source isn't just for sake of lofty ideals, it's also just simpler, easier, and better.

As a consequence of these things, there is a culture around Linux that is not present on OS X and Windows. OS X and Windows people 'blindly' rely on the OS for many things, while on Linux, people hack the OS routinely. You have much more opportunity to ask people about how the OS works (and of course to see the code).

For all those reasons, I would say Linux is by far the best OS for hackers. Of course OS X and Windows are good as well, just in different ways, hacking isn't everything.

> apt-get to install practically any open source software in the world is one.

But I can do that with fink or macports too. OS X is almost FreeBSD with a custom UI and kernel. There is almost nothing (except Linux-kernel level stuff like LXC/Docker/cgroups) that I can't do on OS X that can be done on console Linux. If I really need Linux, I have Vagrant and Virtualbox. Same with X11 apps, though they feel pretty clunky on OS X.

But then, I have all the capabilities that are _better_ than the OSS counterparts: Photoshop, Office, Messaging, Netflix, great GUI and media integration.

I'd also suggest that GUI IDEs like those from JetBrains or editors like Sublime Text are pretty sweet relative to a console-centric toolchain (but I can do that too on the Mac).

Everything you say about open source, of course, is true, but keep in mind OS X (Darwin) from the knees down is also open source; most of what you say applies. It's not "open source vs. proprietary", however, as that's a Stallman-esque view of the world that isn't really congruent with the BSD approach.

I'm not the OP but in summary, I love both Open Source and the OS X experience, to me it's not an either/or proposition, which seems more political than practical.

> But I can do that with fink or macports too.

In my experience, they have nowhere near the range and quality of packaging as Linux distros have. There's just a much larger community for that stuff in Linux than there is for OS X, which focuses less on FOSS.

Yes, you can do all the Linux stuff if you run Linux in a VM. Not the same though as running it directly :) Performance in particular.

> Everything you say about open source, of course, is true, but keep in mind OS X (Darwin) from the knees down is also open source;

Yes, definitely Apple deserves credit for using a FOSS kernel as well as much in userspace - WebKit, LLVM, etc. Still, massive and crucial parts of OS X are proprietary; you aren't allowed to look into those.

> I'm not the OP but in summary, I love both Open Source and the OS X experience, to me it's not an either/or proposition

Of course, I agree completely. As I said above, OS X and Windows are great too, just for different things. Linux wins on hackability, they win on other stuff.

>apt-get to install practically any open source software in the world is one. Partially as a consequence of that, but other stuff as well, the development experience for those using the console and not an IDE is far better on Linux than OS X or (by far) Windows.

I can do that on the Mac too, with MacPorts, Fink, and brew, which I personally use.

And for development or more harcore unixy stuff, I do it in a VM with Vagrant -- I don't want to pollute my machine with installations for the multiple projects I work on (for one, they can need clashing versions of stuff, plus it's not a best practice to have unrelated libs and servers installed for a project that doesn't need it).

>Finally, the "political" stuff you mention is not politics for sake of politics. It stems from very practical real-world things. For example, if I write an app and calling a system library does something unexpected, I can read the source code to see exactly what is going on.

I can do the same on my VM inside the Mac for unix software/OS that I deploy on. But I also found it that I never, ever, had to do something like this for my type of development in 15+ years with regards to a system library.

>OS X and Windows people 'blindly' rely on the OS for many things, while on Linux, people hack the OS routinely.

True, but as a higher end (not drivers or embedded) developer (mostly web and some server stuff), I very much enjoy this culture of not mucking around with the OS.

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