6 ms·

MacOS, is usually the answer.

by pentae 6y ago

OOPMan 6y ago
That begs an even bigger why, given it's such an awful OS in many ways.
- bestnameever 6y ago
  people have different opinions about things. What you think is awful, another may enjoy.
- ubermonkey 6y ago
  LOL. Because people value different things? I stay on MacOS because it works very, very, very well for what I want to do. There are a large number of affirmative reasons I prefer Macs. Hardware build quality has traditionally been stellar, on par with the golden age of Thinkpads (which is one reason the keyboard thing was so jarring). The OS is immensely, profoundly stable. The built-in tools for things like mail, contacts, and calendars work very very well. The overall polish of the experience is unmatched. AND I have access to a bash prompt, and a whole host of FOSS offerings for things I might want. (As I've moved away from actually writing code, this has mostly boiled down to emacs and a few other bits, but still; it's comforting.) I also use an iPhone, an iPad, and have an Apple Watch. The seamless integration is really, really great. I'd be hard pressed to give that up. Add to this the fact that there are material reasons I want to AVOID the other two players: - Windows is a chaotic disaster in terms of consistency, stability, overall design, and general behavior over time. The degree of weird enmeshment of binaries required to install software more or less guarantees system bloat that just doesn't happen on Macs. - Linux can be many things to many people, and if Apple hadn't moved to a unixy base at the turn of the century I'm sure I'd have ended up there. But as it is, I'm just not willing to tinker around to achieve a workable environment for me, or deal with the inevitable interoperability challenges that would come from living without the COTS tools I rely on, like Office.
  - irateswami 6y ago
    So much this, OSX remains a great tool for devs on X86. As much as I would love to move to Linux full time, I also don't want to think or deal with OS issues when I'm trying to write my code. OSX is far more polished than any other unix-based system out there, and there's a ton of support for any issues you might have. I also love homebrew, it strikes a good balance between something like apt and windows-style installers. Toss all that together with the ecosystem that apple offers with it's other products (being able to send texts from my laptop via iMessage was a revelation) and you have one hell of a value proposition. There's a lot of valid criticism against apple but I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the actual devs who rail against them use a MBP for work. People have to understand that these are not your bargain-bin windows laptops, these are premium products. You wouldn't compare a Ferrari to a Toyota Camry, nor would you treat them the same or expect the same level of "performance" across all use cases.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - panpanna 6y ago
    Why is there this illusion that osx just works and linux requires much maintenance?? Only today we had 2-3 _major_ osx issues on HN front page. For example https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1326990296412991489 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/132699029641299148...
    - ubermonkey 6y ago
      It's not maintenance. It's the hassle of getting it to work the way you want it to work (which, for me, would mean "on par with the seamless experience I have on MacOS/iOS). Maintenance is dead easy on Linux. Setting THAT up, though, isn't.
  - jason0597 6y ago
    >Hardware build quality has traditionally been stellar, on par with the golden age of Thinkpads (which is one reason the keyboard thing was so jarring). Really? You think the same Macs that maintain silence by overheating have "stellar" build quality? Seriously, go watch Louis Rossmann's channel. You'll soon see how terrible the build quality in Macbooks is. Just because it's encased in aluminium doesn't mean it's well made.
- clavalle 6y ago
  I used Linux exclusively for a number of years and was pulled into the Mac world kicking and screaming for bureaucratic reasons. I actually like it. I get a sane shell with all of the basic *nix tools I need and I get the wide consumer-level support of the rest of the OS. One basic thing I really enjoy is having extra monitors just work without wrestling with display settings. A small thing, sure, but it was a surprisingly persistent pain.

MacOS, is usually the answer.

by pentae 6y ago

MacOS, is usually the answer.

OOPMan 6y ago

That begs an even bigger why, given it's such an awful OS in many ways.

bestnameever 6y ago
people have different opinions about things. What you think is awful, another may enjoy.
ubermonkey 6y ago
LOL. Because people value different things? I stay on MacOS because it works very, very, very well for what I want to do. There are a large number of affirmative reasons I prefer Macs. Hardware build quality has traditionally been stellar, on par with the golden age of Thinkpads (which is one reason the keyboard thing was so jarring). The OS is immensely, profoundly stable. The built-in tools for things like mail, contacts, and calendars work very very well. The overall polish of the experience is unmatched. AND I have access to a bash prompt, and a whole host of FOSS offerings for things I might want. (As I've moved away from actually writing code, this has mostly boiled down to emacs and a few other bits, but still; it's comforting.) I also use an iPhone, an iPad, and have an Apple Watch. The seamless integration is really, really great. I'd be hard pressed to give that up. Add to this the fact that there are material reasons I want to AVOID the other two players: - Windows is a chaotic disaster in terms of consistency, stability, overall design, and general behavior over time. The degree of weird enmeshment of binaries required to install software more or less guarantees system bloat that just doesn't happen on Macs. - Linux can be many things to many people, and if Apple hadn't moved to a unixy base at the turn of the century I'm sure I'd have ended up there. But as it is, I'm just not willing to tinker around to achieve a workable environment for me, or deal with the inevitable interoperability challenges that would come from living without the COTS tools I rely on, like Office.
- irateswami 6y ago
  So much this, OSX remains a great tool for devs on X86. As much as I would love to move to Linux full time, I also don't want to think or deal with OS issues when I'm trying to write my code. OSX is far more polished than any other unix-based system out there, and there's a ton of support for any issues you might have. I also love homebrew, it strikes a good balance between something like apt and windows-style installers. Toss all that together with the ecosystem that apple offers with it's other products (being able to send texts from my laptop via iMessage was a revelation) and you have one hell of a value proposition. There's a lot of valid criticism against apple but I can pretty much guarantee that 99% of the actual devs who rail against them use a MBP for work. People have to understand that these are not your bargain-bin windows laptops, these are premium products. You wouldn't compare a Ferrari to a Toyota Camry, nor would you treat them the same or expect the same level of "performance" across all use cases.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- panpanna 6y ago
  Why is there this illusion that osx just works and linux requires much maintenance?? Only today we had 2-3 _major_ osx issues on HN front page. For example https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/1326990296412991489 https://twitter.com/lapcatsoftware/status/132699029641299148...
  - ubermonkey 6y ago
    It's not maintenance. It's the hassle of getting it to work the way you want it to work (which, for me, would mean "on par with the seamless experience I have on MacOS/iOS). Maintenance is dead easy on Linux. Setting THAT up, though, isn't.
- jason0597 6y ago
  >Hardware build quality has traditionally been stellar, on par with the golden age of Thinkpads (which is one reason the keyboard thing was so jarring). Really? You think the same Macs that maintain silence by overheating have "stellar" build quality? Seriously, go watch Louis Rossmann's channel. You'll soon see how terrible the build quality in Macbooks is. Just because it's encased in aluminium doesn't mean it's well made.
clavalle 6y ago
I used Linux exclusively for a number of years and was pulled into the Mac world kicking and screaming for bureaucratic reasons. I actually like it. I get a sane shell with all of the basic *nix tools I need and I get the wide consumer-level support of the rest of the OS. One basic thing I really enjoy is having extra monitors just work without wrestling with display settings. A small thing, sure, but it was a surprisingly persistent pain.