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I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix combined with t

I've looked at the trajectory of Apple these past few years with mounting bitter-sweetness. At its best, MacOS really felt like the best of Unix combined with the consumer focus alluded to in the article. I still adore the craftsmanship of the latest Macbooks, but my 2015 Macbook felt like the apex of Mac's design. It was the kind of device that was such a pleasure to develop on. You could leverage the power of Unix in a UI designed with thoughtfulness and care. It reminded you that power and accessibility to end-users can be balanced. And now that balance has tipped away from the power-user, the developers, to the end-user, and in doing so I question my commitment to this extraordinary ecosystem. Why develop on a platform that contends with me every step of the way? Because the users and the money are there? That was never what brought me to the Macbook. EDIT: I suppose most users in the Apple ecosystem aren't on Macbooks, but iPhones.

brightball 6y ago
Every time there’s a new Apple announcement, I’m happier and happier that I switched to Linux a couple of years ago. Power users want freedom and control of their own machines and hardware. The moment that Apple started soldering parts into place, I started looking elsewhere because it was a signal of the thought process.
- scarface74 6y ago
  As does most other high end laptops....
  - brightball 6y ago
    There’s a lot more options for high end laptops for Linux.
    - rorykoehler 6y ago
      Apart from the Dell XPS13 what other options are comparable to the MacBook Pro?
- oneplane 6y ago
  On the flip side: does anyone still buy a low-specced machine and upgrade it mid-lifecycle? I've seen it less and less over the last 6 years and the last 2 years it hasn't happened in any work setting. I know people like to have the feeling of control (do you really control your laptop if you can't replace your EC, CSME, AGESA, SSD FW, NIC FW, VBIOS) and the concept of shuffling parts around, but the need for that (at least in my circle) has pretty much faded.
  - pkaye 6y ago
    Apple usually has a large premium to upgrade the specs. If you can change your own memory or SSD you could save a considerable amount. But now they are soldering everything.
    - oneplane 6y ago
      That is only something people take issue with because it used to be modular. You don't see people making the same argument with phones, printers, iPads, TVs, Cars, Smartwatches etc. I'm not saying soldering things down is ideal, but it's only a problem because people perceive an option that was there but now isn't as 'bad faith' or 'taking away' something. Imagine the riots if we used to be able to change the CPU in a laptop. (in theory we 'used' to be able to but in practise that never worked well because the microcode didn't fit in the firmware and the cooling solution only takes a small amount of TDP variance - popping in a faster CPU meant it overheated so quickly it was useless) Would it be cool if all devices were composable? Sure. Is it something users care about? Not really. I'd like it if Apple found a way to allow swapping of components within the design envelope constraints they create d for themselves, but it also won't have an impact on what I'd buy.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Apple is making it a pain to do even basic things like replace the battery, which is a consumable part. I've personally upgraded the hard drive and replaced the battery twice on my old 2011 MacBook Pro.
    - 6y ago
- metalforever 6y ago
  No, this is not what I want, and I’m a power user. I want my machine to solve my problems and not get in my way when I am creating solutions. I do not want to be messing around with the internals, I have better things to do . I pay for it to just work in an environment I hope is vaguely private.
  - fanatic2pope 6y ago
    > I want my machine to solve my problems and not get in my way when I am creating solutions. That's literally why I switched to Linux in 2018, after a decade on OS X.
    - metalforever 6y ago
      Linux does not solve my problems (as a power user with Linux). It does not work with the proprietary tools I need to do my job and I’ve broken apt way too many times. I’m not remotely interested in debugging this at this stage of my life.
      - marsrover 6y ago
        How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" I haven't used Linux as a main driver in a decade but I do use it very frequently and I am intrigued by all the many ways people online seem to be able to break it. I have never once run into a problem with apt. It really makes me wonder how much time people who complain about Linux have really put into learning it. I'm not thinking you need to read a book on it, but after a few months of just using it I would think one would be reasonably proficient? I understand the claims of needing proprietary software. I, too, with that the Office suite was a first class citizen. That said, it absolutely baffles me the amount of weird ways people have issues.
        eyerony 6y ago
        > How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" Raises hand my home server (running Debian) is currently in a weird state where a whole bunch of packages won't install or update because some library's stuck on a version they don't like. The version they want isn't available. I'm pretty sure I haven't even added any nonstandard repos to it (all it really runs is docker, so anything odd comes in as a docker container rather than a system package—this in part because I don't trust Linux package managers not to break my system when installing non-critical software due to long experience of same happening over and over, go figure). I'm not sure what I did to cause it and it's still running Docker fine so my incentive to spend an hour tracking down and fixing whatever-it-is has been zero—I'm just glad it's not a system I depend on for anything serious or need to really do anything with. I spent a few years running Gentoo as my main machine in the 00s. On a laptop. Got suspend-to-disk working, even. I had to manually install Grub on this same Debian home server when I built it last yer, in a chroot to my newly-installed system, because the installer kept failing to do it (my process to fix it was very ordinary and encountered no problems, AFAIK, so I still don't know why the Debian installer couldn't do it, I've never seen it fail quite that way before, but it did so repeatedly so I had to give up and open up the engine, as it were). So I'm not entirely clueless. Nonetheless I don't really feel confident using a Linux desktop I can't snapshot for emergency rollbacks or rebuild in a few minutes from a script, because damned if weird problems don't crop up when you upgrade. Or don't upgrade. Or reboot, forgetting you'd installed (through the blessed package manager!) a new kernel and now it can't read your encrypted root anymore so is unbootable and now you get to spend some time figuring that out. And so on. I feel no such anxiety on macOS. Not that that it never breaks, but it's rare enough I don't worry about it. FWIW I'm back on desktop Linux now due to Macs' insane prices, but I suspect I made a mistake and the time I've already lost would have made spending an extra $500 on a significantly worse-spec'd machine well worth it. It's a little here, a little there, but it adds up.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  > The moment that Apple started soldering parts into place, I started looking elsewhere because it was a signal of the thought process. Very true! The first thing I did after buying a Mac Mini was to upgrade the RAM and change the HDD to an SSD, and even added an extra HDD. The Apple options for the same were nearly triple the cost. Only an idiot would believe that having soldered CPUs, soldered RAM and now soldered SSDs is a good thing. It is a good thing only for Apple, and Samsung et. al bottomlines. And with ARM processors, you can be sure you'll get a PC with locked bootloaders that won't allow you to even install other operating systems. And the offered OS will also be a dumbed down system like ios that will only allow you install from a locked app store. All the while leeching off your personal data to the cloud. I too have started exploring other alternatives.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  The last T series Thinkpad has soldered RAM. Granted it still has one non-soldered slot, but still. It feels like the world is closing for of us that value power and control.
crystaln 6y ago
I am a developer and power user. I am incredibly happy with every update from Apple. Unix with good design is exactly what I want from my OS. Sure I can't disassemble my laptop and change the hardware. I have no desire at all to do that. I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this, although I imagine there are a tiny fraction of users who would and you may be among them.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Easy. A new application you have needs more RAM. Your battery is not holding up very well and you want to replace it. Your SSD will fail soon and you want to replace it. I had every single one of those issues on a laptop, and fixing them cost me from 25$ to 100$, about a fifth of what the Apple Store or OEM was quoting me. Instead of being without my laptop for a week or two, I got all of them over in an hour and a half tops. Everyone has a device fail them. Then you have the choice of changing it or repairing it, repair is almost always a better option if you're at all technically competent. I can't imagine my SSD breaking down or my RAM failing and having to change the entire mainboard when I could just take 45 minutes and fix it. It's literally absurd to me.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    All that, and also -- Apple sets prices about once a year. Meanwhile, the price of CPUs, RAM and graphics cards drops. For any price level that Apple establishes, I can afford a Hackintosh desktop of much greater power or I can save a lot of money and get equivalent power. Though, to be honest, I don't bother unless there's a particular application which isn't available on Linux.
    - xattt 6y ago
      Photoshop
      - wayneftw 6y ago
        Runs on WINE or in a Windows virtual machine. The latter works fine for me.
zitterbewegung 6y ago
I've always used Apple products because they just work. UNIX compatibility has been great and I've run docker, run virtual machines, given presentations and I love the hardware. Most of the restrictions are tradeoffs for security and the real problem is that I have tried having workflows on other systems and tried to switch off of it (I had linux on my MacBook Pro 2017. Below are my most frustrating situations 1. My MacBook Pro 2017 had some weird problems due to voltage of the CPU. Somehow they misplaced the laptop but they did a full top case replacement eventually. It was weird when someone came out of the store with handcuffs while I was in the Apple store. With this Laptop I wasn't disappointed by the keyboard or the Touch Bar and never experienced reliability issues. I sold it due to frustration but I shouldn't have done it. 2. My AirPods have been replaced twice due to buzzing. This could have been me not cleaning them and sometimes I still experience buzzing sometimes but cleaning them seemed to work. I got both earbuds replaced twice 3. iCloud got messed up on my MacBook 2016 when I installed a beta version of Catalina and that was my fault had to go on support and they never got back to me about an engineer looking at my iCloud. 4. My MacBook Pro Retina (around 2012) had a zebra pattern on the monitor. I took it to the Apple store twice and they just gave me a new laptop. With all of these issues over the years Windows is much more pain to even use. On my Gaming computer Wifi still can take minutes to start. I had to upgrade it to Wifi 6 and that may have fixed it with an external wifi. My current Laptop (MacBook Pro 16) has good thermal management now. Plugging into a monitor does increase the thermals to 60 C . Sometimes I turn off turbo boost. Other than that having a laptop with 64 GB of Ram, a 5500m graphics card is pretty nice especially with a 2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9. Somehow I actually was able to refine a few iterations of GPT-2 on the CPU but that was by mistake when I was cleaning data. I like the Touch Bar because it lets me not change to using the trackpad sometimes due to RSI. I also have an external trackball mouse. Wifi and bluetooth open with no issue. System is really responsive even compared to my Windows machine. Screens have always been amazing and color accurate. Emacs runs great also. Terminal.app keeps on getting better. UI looks like it's going to be cleaned up in MacOS 11. Having ARM is going to be very exciting and Metal is even more exciting and might be the only thing that will start to compete with NVIDIA.
- nvarsj 6y ago
  Interesting you mention Emacs. The Mac port of Emacs runs noticeably slower than Linux depending on operation (magit especially is very slow). This is due to the much slower fork call on OS X I believe. I found Emacs so painfully slow on a MBP 16” I gave up on OS X completely. It might just be you are used to it and it’s good enough. For me OS X feels like a laggy mess.
mstade 6y ago
I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus is why I'm wholly invested in the Apple ecosystem. I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?
- ARandomerDude 6y ago
  For me, the React Native experience has been instructive. Android is quick and easy to develop, debug, and deploy. The iOS side includes multiple hoops, constant frustration stemming from XCode, long app release times, and minutes-long builds for production-size apps. Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release.
  - askafriend 6y ago
    As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. It's always janky and commpromises UX in ways that made me simply use the app less or had the effect of teaching me to "get in and out of the app as quickly as possible".
    - ARandomerDude 6y ago
      As with everything, it depends on the implementation. There are some things I'd like to clean up about our app, but overall feedback has been very positive.
    - com2kid 6y ago
      > As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. If it is a good react native app you won't know it is RN. If you notice it, it is by definition poorly done. There are some things (e.g. specific animations, UI elements) that RN just isn't great at, the best way to avoid making a janky app is to avoid even trying to do those things.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
I came to Mac because copy/pasta into a Windows CMD terminal is/was abysmal in 2010. I didn't know about Powershell at the time, so you don't know if that would have made life nicer. The other reason I switched was because all of my developer friends knew nothing about Windows, and getting stuck on a maybe Windows problem meant I had to fend for myself when I needed help the most.
heavyset_go 6y ago
I used to use macOS because it was a Unix that looked good and just worked, but both observations have become less and less true with time. In that same time, Linux really caught up and diverged such that it offers features in its kernel, like cgroups and kernel namespaces, that macOS doesn't match, leaving me to feel as if the old FreeBSD roots of macOS are less of a perk and more of a kludge in 2020. Today, I run Linux on my MacBook because it is a modern Unix clone that looks good and works well with all of my development tools. Native Docker is a treat.
- francoisp 6y ago
  What flavor or unix if I may ask? Do you have driver issues?TIA! Cheers.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    I'm using Kubuntu, and I haven't had any driver issues yet, but I'm not doing anything crazy with hardware or using proprietary drivers. It's been a pretty pleasant experience.
jmull 6y ago
> And now that balance has tipped away from the power-user, the developers, to the end-user What do you mean by that? (Personally, I can't think of anything I can't do now that I could do five or ten years ago on my Mac. Yet a lot of things are better.)
BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
This somewhat echoes some of Steve Job's own complaints about the Apple he was kicked out of: https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=2078 https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=2078 Also note that at the time he was creating a NeXT, a Unix company.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  Thanks for linking the video. Interesting to listen to Jobs -- seems to me too that he argues against what Apple is doing nowadays. I actually 10 minutes ago had a look at how much a 32 GB Mac costs nowadays -- and it's like 2x more than a 32 GB PC. That's less than some years ago, then a Mac was more like 3x more expensive, if I remember correctly. Looks like the trend Jobs mentions in the video, about lower and lower ASP. (ASP = average selling price, right.)
FGTaboutOSx 6y ago
Wow back to the UNIX morons. You're a hipster, basically just typing ls -l in the command-prompt all day, that's fantastic isn't it? You're "on UNIX" in the most retarded way. Get a real system. I recommend Arch, obviously, as any sane person would, but anything is better than Mac. Apple. How fucked up are you? Get a girl in some other way. No need to lug an apple laptop down the streets. Save you some money. Fucking asshole. You're a fucking moron dude. Get with the times and get with reality. Get a fucking whatever and install linux on it. You're just pathetic.
webmobdev 6y ago
It went all downhill once a computer became a smartphone / tablet and the common mass accepted that not being to upgrade them is normal. And now we have mac mini's with soldered ram and soldered cpus and even soldered ssd's and batteries that cannot be removed. The huge amount of waste that this generate is so upsetting. Wish more efforts like the Puzzle phone in europe would bear some fruit.
treebornfrog 6y ago
I have a 13' macbook Pro. Really is the pinnacle. I don't even know which osx it is, but it just feels a lot more 'serious'. I'm not a fan of the new OSX, guess mobile is more prevalent and maybe apple are hoping the iPhone and ipad can be gateway drugs into macbooks / desktop by being more of the same.
tarsinge 6y ago
Maybe someone more knowledgable on Apple history can correct me but aren't MacBooks being attractive to developers due to the Unix layer a happy accident? Apple never made a plan for that, and I don't think they really care more about that demographic more than before. I use Macs since nearly 30 years and I find it useful that I can now also develop on it, but I can totally envision switching for work, just like in the pre-Intel era. Apple always was about end-users, don't fight it.
francoisp 6y ago
I second this. My MBPs 2015 are the best machine ever. The only things that could make them better is upgradeable RAM (16GB can be tight with VMs) and an nvidia gpu for faster DL prototyping offline. Apple Unix has a long history (AIX) but MacOSX was most def the best OS ever. As Apple is moving away from this unix power users's paradise, MS seems to be moving in, with tighter and tighter integration, now offering easy GPU passthrough to the unix subsystem... Open sourcing the rest of 10.14 would be really awesome by Apple. (one can only dream)
boltzmann_brain 6y ago
Yes, it's sad. Microsoft saw that quite a while ago and added WSL to Windows 10, hoping to lure non Windows developers and it seems to work. Windows 10 is bloated and has its own issues, but it's still a desktop first OS that I seem to prefer more and more than macOS. Well, personally I feel at home on Linux the most, but it's hard to get a solid Linux laptop sanctioned by the company.

brightball 6y ago

Every time there’s a new Apple announcement, I’m happier and happier that I switched to Linux a couple of years ago. Power users want freedom and control of their own machines and hardware. The moment that Apple started soldering parts into place, I started looking elsewhere because it was a signal of the thought process.

scarface74 6y ago
As does most other high end laptops....
- brightball 6y ago
  There’s a lot more options for high end laptops for Linux.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Apart from the Dell XPS13 what other options are comparable to the MacBook Pro?
oneplane 6y ago
On the flip side: does anyone still buy a low-specced machine and upgrade it mid-lifecycle? I've seen it less and less over the last 6 years and the last 2 years it hasn't happened in any work setting. I know people like to have the feeling of control (do you really control your laptop if you can't replace your EC, CSME, AGESA, SSD FW, NIC FW, VBIOS) and the concept of shuffling parts around, but the need for that (at least in my circle) has pretty much faded.
- pkaye 6y ago
  Apple usually has a large premium to upgrade the specs. If you can change your own memory or SSD you could save a considerable amount. But now they are soldering everything.
  - oneplane 6y ago
    That is only something people take issue with because it used to be modular. You don't see people making the same argument with phones, printers, iPads, TVs, Cars, Smartwatches etc. I'm not saying soldering things down is ideal, but it's only a problem because people perceive an option that was there but now isn't as 'bad faith' or 'taking away' something. Imagine the riots if we used to be able to change the CPU in a laptop. (in theory we 'used' to be able to but in practise that never worked well because the microcode didn't fit in the firmware and the cooling solution only takes a small amount of TDP variance - popping in a faster CPU meant it overheated so quickly it was useless) Would it be cool if all devices were composable? Sure. Is it something users care about? Not really. I'd like it if Apple found a way to allow swapping of components within the design envelope constraints they create d for themselves, but it also won't have an impact on what I'd buy.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Apple is making it a pain to do even basic things like replace the battery, which is a consumable part. I've personally upgraded the hard drive and replaced the battery twice on my old 2011 MacBook Pro.
  - 6y ago
metalforever 6y ago
No, this is not what I want, and I’m a power user. I want my machine to solve my problems and not get in my way when I am creating solutions. I do not want to be messing around with the internals, I have better things to do . I pay for it to just work in an environment I hope is vaguely private.
- fanatic2pope 6y ago
  > I want my machine to solve my problems and not get in my way when I am creating solutions. That's literally why I switched to Linux in 2018, after a decade on OS X.
  - metalforever 6y ago
    Linux does not solve my problems (as a power user with Linux). It does not work with the proprietary tools I need to do my job and I’ve broken apt way too many times. I’m not remotely interested in debugging this at this stage of my life.
    - marsrover 6y ago
      How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" I haven't used Linux as a main driver in a decade but I do use it very frequently and I am intrigued by all the many ways people online seem to be able to break it. I have never once run into a problem with apt. It really makes me wonder how much time people who complain about Linux have really put into learning it. I'm not thinking you need to read a book on it, but after a few months of just using it I would think one would be reasonably proficient? I understand the claims of needing proprietary software. I, too, with that the Office suite was a first class citizen. That said, it absolutely baffles me the amount of weird ways people have issues.
      - eyerony 6y ago
        > How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?" Raises hand my home server (running Debian) is currently in a weird state where a whole bunch of packages won't install or update because some library's stuck on a version they don't like. The version they want isn't available. I'm pretty sure I haven't even added any nonstandard repos to it (all it really runs is docker, so anything odd comes in as a docker container rather than a system package—this in part because I don't trust Linux package managers not to break my system when installing non-critical software due to long experience of same happening over and over, go figure). I'm not sure what I did to cause it and it's still running Docker fine so my incentive to spend an hour tracking down and fixing whatever-it-is has been zero—I'm just glad it's not a system I depend on for anything serious or need to really do anything with. I spent a few years running Gentoo as my main machine in the 00s. On a laptop. Got suspend-to-disk working, even. I had to manually install Grub on this same Debian home server when I built it last yer, in a chroot to my newly-installed system, because the installer kept failing to do it (my process to fix it was very ordinary and encountered no problems, AFAIK, so I still don't know why the Debian installer couldn't do it, I've never seen it fail quite that way before, but it did so repeatedly so I had to give up and open up the engine, as it were). So I'm not entirely clueless. Nonetheless I don't really feel confident using a Linux desktop I can't snapshot for emergency rollbacks or rebuild in a few minutes from a script, because damned if weird problems don't crop up when you upgrade. Or don't upgrade. Or reboot, forgetting you'd installed (through the blessed package manager!) a new kernel and now it can't read your encrypted root anymore so is unbootable and now you get to spend some time figuring that out. And so on. I feel no such anxiety on macOS. Not that that it never breaks, but it's rare enough I don't worry about it. FWIW I'm back on desktop Linux now due to Macs' insane prices, but I suspect I made a mistake and the time I've already lost would have made spending an extra $500 on a significantly worse-spec'd machine well worth it. It's a little here, a little there, but it adds up.
webmobdev 6y ago
> The moment that Apple started soldering parts into place, I started looking elsewhere because it was a signal of the thought process. Very true! The first thing I did after buying a Mac Mini was to upgrade the RAM and change the HDD to an SSD, and even added an extra HDD. The Apple options for the same were nearly triple the cost. Only an idiot would believe that having soldered CPUs, soldered RAM and now soldered SSDs is a good thing. It is a good thing only for Apple, and Samsung et. al bottomlines. And with ARM processors, you can be sure you'll get a PC with locked bootloaders that won't allow you to even install other operating systems. And the offered OS will also be a dumbed down system like ios that will only allow you install from a locked app store. All the while leeching off your personal data to the cloud. I too have started exploring other alternatives.
tomjen3 6y ago
The last T series Thinkpad has soldered RAM. Granted it still has one non-soldered slot, but still. It feels like the world is closing for of us that value power and control.

crystaln 6y ago

I am a developer and power user. I am incredibly happy with every update from Apple. Unix with good design is exactly what I want from my OS. Sure I can't disassemble my laptop and change the hardware. I have no desire at all to do that. I literally can think of no reason I personally would want to do this, although I imagine there are a tiny fraction of users who would and you may be among them.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Easy. A new application you have needs more RAM. Your battery is not holding up very well and you want to replace it. Your SSD will fail soon and you want to replace it. I had every single one of those issues on a laptop, and fixing them cost me from 25$ to 100$, about a fifth of what the Apple Store or OEM was quoting me. Instead of being without my laptop for a week or two, I got all of them over in an hour and a half tops. Everyone has a device fail them. Then you have the choice of changing it or repairing it, repair is almost always a better option if you're at all technically competent. I can't imagine my SSD breaking down or my RAM failing and having to change the entire mainboard when I could just take 45 minutes and fix it. It's literally absurd to me.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  All that, and also -- Apple sets prices about once a year. Meanwhile, the price of CPUs, RAM and graphics cards drops. For any price level that Apple establishes, I can afford a Hackintosh desktop of much greater power or I can save a lot of money and get equivalent power. Though, to be honest, I don't bother unless there's a particular application which isn't available on Linux.
  - xattt 6y ago
    Photoshop
    - wayneftw 6y ago
      Runs on WINE or in a Windows virtual machine. The latter works fine for me.

zitterbewegung 6y ago

I've always used Apple products because they just work. UNIX compatibility has been great and I've run docker, run virtual machines, given presentations and I love the hardware. Most of the restrictions are tradeoffs for security and the real problem is that I have tried having workflows on other systems and tried to switch off of it (I had linux on my MacBook Pro 2017. Below are my most frustrating situations 1. My MacBook Pro 2017 had some weird problems due to voltage of the CPU. Somehow they misplaced the laptop but they did a full top case replacement eventually. It was weird when someone came out of the store with handcuffs while I was in the Apple store. With this Laptop I wasn't disappointed by the keyboard or the Touch Bar and never experienced reliability issues. I sold it due to frustration but I shouldn't have done it. 2. My AirPods have been replaced twice due to buzzing. This could have been me not cleaning them and sometimes I still experience buzzing sometimes but cleaning them seemed to work. I got both earbuds replaced twice 3. iCloud got messed up on my MacBook 2016 when I installed a beta version of Catalina and that was my fault had to go on support and they never got back to me about an engineer looking at my iCloud. 4. My MacBook Pro Retina (around 2012) had a zebra pattern on the monitor. I took it to the Apple store twice and they just gave me a new laptop. With all of these issues over the years Windows is much more pain to even use. On my Gaming computer Wifi still can take minutes to start. I had to upgrade it to Wifi 6 and that may have fixed it with an external wifi. My current Laptop (MacBook Pro 16) has good thermal management now. Plugging into a monitor does increase the thermals to 60 C . Sometimes I turn off turbo boost. Other than that having a laptop with 64 GB of Ram, a 5500m graphics card is pretty nice especially with a 2.3 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9. Somehow I actually was able to refine a few iterations of GPT-2 on the CPU but that was by mistake when I was cleaning data. I like the Touch Bar because it lets me not change to using the trackpad sometimes due to RSI. I also have an external trackball mouse. Wifi and bluetooth open with no issue. System is really responsive even compared to my Windows machine. Screens have always been amazing and color accurate. Emacs runs great also. Terminal.app keeps on getting better. UI looks like it's going to be cleaned up in MacOS 11. Having ARM is going to be very exciting and Metal is even more exciting and might be the only thing that will start to compete with NVIDIA.

nvarsj 6y ago
Interesting you mention Emacs. The Mac port of Emacs runs noticeably slower than Linux depending on operation (magit especially is very slow). This is due to the much slower fork call on OS X I believe. I found Emacs so painfully slow on a MBP 16” I gave up on OS X completely. It might just be you are used to it and it’s good enough. For me OS X feels like a laggy mess.

mstade 6y ago

I keep reading these types of comments on HN but I just can't relate. I consider myself a power user, and precisely because MacOS feels like the best of Unix combined with customer focus is why I'm wholly invested in the Apple ecosystem. I simply can't relate to the statement that Mac is a "platform that contends with me every step of the way" and I'm curious to know more specifically why you feel this way?

ARandomerDude 6y ago
For me, the React Native experience has been instructive. Android is quick and easy to develop, debug, and deploy. The iOS side includes multiple hoops, constant frustration stemming from XCode, long app release times, and minutes-long builds for production-size apps. Our team, without any policy dictating daily development habits, has coalesced around Linux/Android development with iOS testing before release.
- askafriend 6y ago
  As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. It's always janky and commpromises UX in ways that made me simply use the app less or had the effect of teaching me to "get in and out of the app as quickly as possible".
  - ARandomerDude 6y ago
    As with everything, it depends on the implementation. There are some things I'd like to clean up about our app, but overall feedback has been very positive.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    > As a consumer, I've never used a React Native app that I liked using. If it is a good react native app you won't know it is RN. If you notice it, it is by definition poorly done. There are some things (e.g. specific animations, UI elements) that RN just isn't great at, the best way to avoid making a janky app is to avoid even trying to do those things.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

I came to Mac because copy/pasta into a Windows CMD terminal is/was abysmal in 2010. I didn't know about Powershell at the time, so you don't know if that would have made life nicer. The other reason I switched was because all of my developer friends knew nothing about Windows, and getting stuck on a maybe Windows problem meant I had to fend for myself when I needed help the most.

heavyset_go 6y ago

I used to use macOS because it was a Unix that looked good and just worked, but both observations have become less and less true with time. In that same time, Linux really caught up and diverged such that it offers features in its kernel, like cgroups and kernel namespaces, that macOS doesn't match, leaving me to feel as if the old FreeBSD roots of macOS are less of a perk and more of a kludge in 2020. Today, I run Linux on my MacBook because it is a modern Unix clone that looks good and works well with all of my development tools. Native Docker is a treat.

francoisp 6y ago
What flavor or unix if I may ask? Do you have driver issues?TIA! Cheers.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  I'm using Kubuntu, and I haven't had any driver issues yet, but I'm not doing anything crazy with hardware or using proprietary drivers. It's been a pretty pleasant experience.

jmull 6y ago

> And now that balance has tipped away from the power-user, the developers, to the end-user What do you mean by that? (Personally, I can't think of anything I can't do now that I could do five or ten years ago on my Mac. Yet a lot of things are better.)

BenoitEssiambre 6y ago

This somewhat echoes some of Steve Job's own complaints about the Apple he was kicked out of: https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=2078 https://youtu.be/Gk-9Fd2mEnI?t=2078 Also note that at the time he was creating a NeXT, a Unix company.

HappyDreamer 6y ago
Thanks for linking the video. Interesting to listen to Jobs -- seems to me too that he argues against what Apple is doing nowadays. I actually 10 minutes ago had a look at how much a 32 GB Mac costs nowadays -- and it's like 2x more than a 32 GB PC. That's less than some years ago, then a Mac was more like 3x more expensive, if I remember correctly. Looks like the trend Jobs mentions in the video, about lower and lower ASP. (ASP = average selling price, right.)

FGTaboutOSx 6y ago

Wow back to the UNIX morons. You're a hipster, basically just typing ls -l in the command-prompt all day, that's fantastic isn't it? You're "on UNIX" in the most retarded way. Get a real system. I recommend Arch, obviously, as any sane person would, but anything is better than Mac. Apple. How fucked up are you? Get a girl in some other way. No need to lug an apple laptop down the streets. Save you some money. Fucking asshole. You're a fucking moron dude. Get with the times and get with reality. Get a fucking whatever and install linux on it. You're just pathetic.

webmobdev 6y ago

It went all downhill once a computer became a smartphone / tablet and the common mass accepted that not being to upgrade them is normal. And now we have mac mini's with soldered ram and soldered cpus and even soldered ssd's and batteries that cannot be removed. The huge amount of waste that this generate is so upsetting. Wish more efforts like the Puzzle phone in europe would bear some fruit.

treebornfrog 6y ago

I have a 13' macbook Pro. Really is the pinnacle. I don't even know which osx it is, but it just feels a lot more 'serious'. I'm not a fan of the new OSX, guess mobile is more prevalent and maybe apple are hoping the iPhone and ipad can be gateway drugs into macbooks / desktop by being more of the same.

tarsinge 6y ago

Maybe someone more knowledgable on Apple history can correct me but aren't MacBooks being attractive to developers due to the Unix layer a happy accident? Apple never made a plan for that, and I don't think they really care more about that demographic more than before. I use Macs since nearly 30 years and I find it useful that I can now also develop on it, but I can totally envision switching for work, just like in the pre-Intel era. Apple always was about end-users, don't fight it.

francoisp 6y ago

I second this. My MBPs 2015 are the best machine ever. The only things that could make them better is upgradeable RAM (16GB can be tight with VMs) and an nvidia gpu for faster DL prototyping offline. Apple Unix has a long history (AIX) but MacOSX was most def the best OS ever. As Apple is moving away from this unix power users's paradise, MS seems to be moving in, with tighter and tighter integration, now offering easy GPU passthrough to the unix subsystem... Open sourcing the rest of 10.14 would be really awesome by Apple. (one can only dream)

boltzmann_brain 6y ago

Yes, it's sad. Microsoft saw that quite a while ago and added WSL to Windows 10, hoping to lure non Windows developers and it seems to work. Windows 10 is bloated and has its own issues, but it's still a desktop first OS that I seem to prefer more and more than macOS. Well, personally I feel at home on Linux the most, but it's hard to get a solid Linux laptop sanctioned by the company.