I've been using Apple laptops since the G4 Ti Powerbook (in ~2003 I think) - and have generally been on a ~2-4 year upgrade cycle. Last February (~15mo ago) I w

I've been using Apple laptops since the G4 Ti Powerbook (in ~2003 I think) - and have generally been on a ~2-4 year upgrade cycle. Last February (~15mo ago) I went from my 2015 13" MBP to a new Macbook Air - they had touch ID, no touchbar, I didn't mind the keyboard and the performance with similar to the old MBP I had. Now I'm not sure if it's Catalina or the hardware itself - but this machine became almost unusably slow, coupled with some issue where it would not hold a charge - I would routinely open it up in the morning and it would give me the dead battery icon. On this particular issue I tried to dig into it, and something was waking it from sleep every ~5 minutes or so - it was quite evident on the power usage graph, and I found some others online with similar stories. And even on top of this the machine would occasionally panic and reboot - I don't think I ever saw my old MBP do that, and I'm unsure if this is a function of the hardware or the OS update. Either way I got pretty frustrated with it, as it had moved into the realm of how I remembered linux laptops - a month ago I finally made the call to get ride of it (read: give it to the wife) and get a new laptop. I picked up a dell xps13, turned off the touchscreen in the bios and loaded up my debian netinst and began the process. Immediately I was hit with the wifi in this device needing the non-free drivers sigh just like I remember installing linux on a laptop... Either way, I got it done and I'm actually really happy with the outcome - most things just work (wifi, media keys, keyboard backlight) straight out of the box - the only thing lacking is the fingerprint reader, which apparently Dell is releasing drivers for. The thing isn't perfect - battery life is ~5-6 hours (firefox, editor, terminals) where I think I was getting 8-9 at least on the MBA, and this is far from the advertised time under Windows. So all in all, I feel that there has been a significant decline in the experience on Apple hardware over the last couple of years - as I said above I'm not sure if this is hardware, software or both. Another anecdata point: the wife picked up a new iMac when they were released pre-Catalina - she loved it, however after the Catalina update she has had endless problems - the filesystem reporting different amounts of free space depending on how you view it, Photos not loading, the iTunes migration has caused endless headaches... So whilst I'm unsure of the hardware quality, I'm sure this is in part due to the changes in Catalina.