9 ms·

The Mac is losing me

54 points by lawik 6y ago

ncmncm 6y ago
The time to stop allowing yourself to be exploited is ever and always right now. Last year might have been better, but a year from now you could think that again. Now is the best you can ever do.
rleigh 6y ago
Hard to argue with any of his points, I've felt the same way about the state of Mac hardware and software for even longer. The software quality has been on a slow but sure slide for well over a decade at this point. The quality of Catalina is not good. Recently I've been using it more and have regular system crashes. There are serious bugs in the kernel. Big Sur looks like another step down in polish and quality. "More iOS" is simply bad strategy for a desktop operating system. I want a tool for professional work, not a locked down and dumbed down entertainment appliance. 10-15 years back, paying the premium for an Apple system got you a premium product. And back then, the premium was not excessive for the gain in hardware build quality and the software. Today, that is no longer the case. The value proposition is just not there. You're paying very inflated amounts of money for mediocre performance, nice looking but sorely limited hardware, and bad quality software.
- beagle3 6y ago
  > Today, that is no longer the case. My feeling is the opposite: There used to be an Apple hardware premium that was not (to me) justifiable at the time. But as the software slowly declines, so does the premium - it feels to me like the M1 macs are priced with almost no premium anymore - there is nothing comparable right now (battery-life-wise, processors-speed-wise), but even with the Intel ones, a similarly specced base hardware is similarly priced (and the mac has much higher build quality than e.g. dell and hp in my experience). The place where you still pay Apple premium is the upgrades (more memory, more disk). But overall, there's isn't much of a premium paid anymore when buying an Apple.
  - theklr 6y ago
    You know these are the low tier macs right? They did the same with the first intels...I am really concerned with us collectively having such poor recency bias. We’re only at the beginning of the transition. These macs they replaced were already bottom feeders and their punching above their weight. Give them by this time next year and we’ll have a better argument to form.
  - banachtarski 6y ago
    Counterpoint, would you buy a machine in 2020 to service as a developer laptop or desktop with 8 gb of ram and 512 gb of storage? Saying that the premiums are "just the upgrades" sort of ignores what those upgrades actually are and how much they cost.
    - danmur 6y ago
      Not really related but I got a surface pro to replace an Android tablet and even though I'm a native Linux user I find myself doing some light dev work on it. It's quite pleasant even with only 8gb of RAM. It only cost $700 though. If it was more expensive if be pretty unhappy about all the many, many deficiencies. My partner has a new MacBook, a lot more expensive, and the performance is atrocious.
    - aldanor 6y ago
      512GB for a dev laptop? Yes I would. For 16GB RAM you pay +$200, even with that added the total price is still pretty low given what you get.
    - bfrog 6y ago
      Wait, the base spec has 8gb? Can you even start chrome up on there? I'd be scared of running out with chrome and a few tabs....
      - jason0597 6y ago
        I've been running Chrome on my Arch desktop with 8GiB of RAM just fine for the last couple of years. Usually averaging to 20 tabs
- porker 6y ago
  I don't know what exactly Jobs did, but post-Jobs was when I felt the software quality start to slide. I assume he had amazing attention to detail.
  - cJ0th 6y ago
    I assume that Apple's next chapter started coincidently with the leaving of Steve Jobs. Of course, I do not know if Jobs would be cool with today's Apple. But he certainly worked hard at turning it into the cash cow it is nowadays. So in other words, we are in a different cell of the BCG Matrix today.
  - Turing_Machine 6y ago
    "It's not that Steve was magical. It's that he was f*ing terrifying."
    - fzil 6y ago
      you have source on that quote? I searched and couldn't find anything.
      - Turing_Machine 6y ago
        Sorry, I don't. Vague memory says it was something someone said in a Facebook comment thread. Not very helpful, I know.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Gys 6y ago
  You (and I) are clearly not the target market. 95% (guessing) of the people use their computer only for email/browsing and gaming. Apple is a premium brand for them, bought as a statement (I am cool, or something). People pay premium for most things: clothing, watches, cars, etc. Many of these more expensive things we buy do not differ much of the competition, except for being a well known brand.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
toyg 6y ago
I am heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem: MBP, iPhone, iPad, tons of apps. But I’ve decided I’m out. Ryzen-based machines have caught up; Windows has caught up; and I’m willing to give the Linux desktop the benefit of the doubt again. Every new macOS release I feel more and more boiled to death, more locked in, more exploited than before. Even the eyecandy, which was what I loved OSX from the very first release, is now utterly terrible and getting worse release after release. I was happy to pay a premium for a premium platform, but this is not what I’ve been getting in the last 5 years - what I’ve been getting is a support role to the iPhone ecosystem that is the alpha and the omega of Apple’s strategy, and more and more restrictions to satisfy this role. Obviously this is good for them, but it just isn’t for me, so I’m out.
- mosselman 6y ago
  Give Pop!_OS a try. It is great for gaming. I have a very old Intel i5 (2500k) and a Nvidia GTX 970 (I think) and I have a very solid gaming experience with Steam Play on it. Pop!_OS is Ubuntu based but with Flatpak instead of Snap and without the Ubuntu calling home stuff. Meaning it is great for development. Last time I tried developing on Windows I remember being very frustrated. Now I don't have Windows installed on anything and I am happier for it.
  - apareis 6y ago
    Do as I did and play with the various distros in VirtualBox for a bit. Have a careful look at the Desktop Environment, i.e., which one suits you. Doesn't take long to figure out whether a distro is for you or not. If you don't like it from trying coming from a Mac, then it won't be good enough for the long haul. I've tried so fedora, Pop!_OS, elementary, KDE Neon. As a long term Ubuntu / Debian (server) user I was used to apt but would be open to other package managers. Based on my trials, I'm probably going to go ahead with KDE Neon, that is Ubuntu with KDE Plasma Desktop. This seems to be a nice cross-over between Windows 10 and MacOS with sane defaults but enough options to tailor it to my liking.
- falseAss 6y ago
  Did you find any decent alternative laptop? I find my daily routines have been deeply overfitted to macbook/macOS on a firmware level. The sunk cost can be quite staggering for users like me.
mam2 6y ago
I have never nderstood people buying Apple. Some people here mention paying a premium for a premium service but i dont see it: - best case scenario you buy a tech which is 1 year ahead in quality, but if you buy a computer for min 5 years this reasoning makes not so much sense to me. - you still have a thousand limitations such as games, compatibility with other devices, being locked in and the planned slowdown of devices when new releases are here.. Most people i know who had apple computers or phones did not even buy it for argument 1. They were just laypeople who just bought it because they thought it was cool, and actually were surprised by all the limitations afterward. To apple only made their money on the power of FAME and "coolness" only. I dont see how the "product" has ever been any better at any point. (Ok except the iphone in the first smartphone years.)
- thatswrong0 6y ago
  I’m a developer, I’m a music producer, I almost exclusively use touch pads, I hate Windows, and in general I don’t want to futz around with my operating system. I want shit to just work and I don’t want my OS to constantly badger me and show me ads. So yeah, I’ll stick with my Mac purely because it is “cool” even though it has sooo many limitations that make it unbearable to use on a daily basis
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I understand it as a music producer because of Logic, but I don't understand it as a developer. At all to be honest.
    - spiderfarmer 6y ago
      Being a developer doesn't automatically mean you should hate Apple. I'm a developer, and I don't.
      - raxxorrax 6y ago
        I don't hate Apple, I recommend it for certain users. But it cannot really supply me with anything that isn't available to me while maintaining more freedom and flexibility. I also don't like to develop against their environment since I think it to be too restrictive.
autocorr 6y ago
Just a note for anyone thinking about transitioning from macOS to a Linux desktop workstation, like the author here: I would advise against using "as light a desktop environment as I can stomach". Full-featured desktops like KDE and Gnome are comparatively light on resources and also simplify your personal system administration considerably. If you want to customize everything, by all means! :) That's the beauty of Free Software. But despite what you may remember from 10+ years ago, KDE today is definitely not "heavy".
spiderfarmer 6y ago
It feels like how older tech nerds get, the more nostalgic and conservative they become. Remember when your parents said "everything is moving so quickly, and it's not getting better"? You're now reaching a point in live where you wish for simpler times. Apple is not perfect. I also agree their quality is getting worse. I understand why people say that everything used to be better. But their customers can now do things with their hard- and software that we couldn't imagine 10 years ago. That progress has a cost. Apple can't be everything to everyone. They're fine with the churn rate as it is.
- 8fingerlouie 6y ago
  “I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
  - masswerk 6y ago
    Regarding 3) However, this time it's not solely about tech, but about workflows. Apple was once leading in human-computer symbiosis, now, seeing Big Sur, Apple has become actually bad about this. (I get that Apple is now a media house, but the Big iOS won't do for all purposes. A computer, and we may say, historically especially the Mac, isn't only about consuming and a virtual kaleidoscope, it's also the universal means of production since a few decades ago.)
    - 8fingerlouie 6y ago
      What's so bad about Big Sur (except the bypassing firewalls) ? From what little experience i have with it (being recently released), everything still just works as expected. They changed the layout of a few things, but at least from my usage perspective it still works every bit as well as the previous versions. Granted, i mostly use mail, text editors, terminals and browsers with the occational hobby photo editing and 3d printing slicers, but for my programming and photo workflows it still fits the bill nicely. I use Windows 10 at work every day, and while it runs well enough there are still countless "little things" that bug me. About 10-15 years ago i stopped doing "point and click" to open applications, and instead rely on Spotlight to find and open apps. This works 99% of the time. On windows ... not so much. Press the windows key, start typing, and it either doesn't find what you're trying to open, or it finds it, but in the time it takes my brain to register the correct result i have typed another (correct) letter, and the wanted result is gone, replaced by some annoying Bing website. Control Panel ? Why do we need 3-4 of them ?
Nashooo 6y ago
What would be a good laptop alternative to the MBP 2019? I really prefer UNIX over windows for development but enjoy windows for the 'office' software. OSX really hits the sweet spot in between for me. What would you recommend windows with WSL2 or VM? Archlinux dual-boot?
- tga 6y ago
  ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen3 would be a direct alternative. Also look at X1 Carbon (lighter but only 16GB RAM), T-series (cheaper but heavier), P-series (performance, but big and expensive).
- 1_player 6y ago
  Going from 3 years in the Mac world back to Arch Linux was too much of a shock to bear. Plenty of stuff is still unpolished, in flux, making for a subpar desktop experience. I'm on WSL2 now and honestly, I'm loving it.
8fingerlouie 6y ago
As an "old fart" that has used just about every operating system for the past 30 years (OS/2, BeOS and Linux included), i switched to Macs around the time OS/X was released. Besides the "keyboardgate" on recent Macbook Pro's, i don't really have any complaints about the hardware. Maybe it's getting worse, but still way ahead of the generic PC vendor quality. I have a 2009 MBP that still sees daily use, and still fulfills a purpose (not it's original one). I can't say that for any of my regular laptops. Just a simple thing as the touchpad. On my Mac it "just works" as i expect it to, and rarely gets in my way. I've yet to meet a generic PC touchpad that doesn't annoy me in 30 seconds or less. As for the software. I can't really say it's gotten worse. I rarely experience crashes on my Macs, and kernel panics has been maybe 3-4 times in a decade. Most of the time i open up my Macbook, do "stuff", and close the lid again. It auto installs software updates whenever it's charging and not being used, and automatically reboots and resumes whatever windows i had open (minus terminal windows), so from a user perspective i never reboot it. It integrates well with my iPhone, Airpods, iPad, and even Apple TVs. Yes i'm aware competing technologies exists, and individually they may even perform better, but they don't integrate fully with each other. As for Apple, it "just works". Apple may be a popular target, but they're still a lot better than the alternatives, especially if you're dug in deep in their eco system.
- woof 6y ago
  Old fart here too. I have the exact same experience as you, and even after using Linux om multiple machines for 20+ years (desktops, laptops and servers) I still prefer Macs and MacOS. Changed work recently and went back to my late 2013 MacBook Pro for a few months. It still works great with Big Sur - try that on a 7 years old PC... And I love my 2 days old MacBook Pro m1, the keyboard is perfect and the esc-key is as God intended it (yeah, for emacs...).
- visarga 6y ago
  > As for Apple, it "just works". Counterpoint - I have an MBP and AirPods and often I can't connect them together. Both produced by the same company, yet quite unreliable together. It's probably related to the shitty BT implementation, or WiFi noise. But to sell expensive headphones that fail at producing, you know, ... sound, it's quite a feat. And on this MBP model there's no wired microphone input, because aesthetics, or just to save a penny.
masswerk 6y ago
I'd love to see a Mac restart for those who actually work with and on the computer. – Think NeXt for the 2020s.
least 6y ago
For many people, Apple offered laptops that they felt checked the right boxes for their needs and now they don’t. Whenever Apple makes a change to the operating system people come out of the wood works to chip in their 2 cents about how much worse everything is now and how much better it all used to be back when they first fell in love with the Mac. Apple made it marginally more difficult for power users to install software they want on their computer so that must be an indication of their move to walling off the software ecosystem on the mac! It’s a one time one extra step for something that is a relative rarity, running unsigned applications. Unless all you do all day is download and run unsigned .dmg files from github, this seems like a remarkably rare occurrence that you have to address. MacOS now defaults to being rootless! System Integrity Protection clearly exists to restrict me from running any code I want on MY COMPUTER! Well, except that it can be turned off by anyone who knows and cares to do so (i.e. the power user) while retaining the security benefits that it gives to the vast majority of users that don’t need the functionality it provides. Nearly any move apple has made that at a cursory glance looks to be being made to close off the Mac software ecosystem hasn’t actually stopped people from running arbitrary code on the OS. It’s some weird sense of entitlement that power users seem to have and they get indignant that they have to change their behavior at all. I remember when I first tried linux from Windows and the whole idea of having to sudo to install software made me upset. I’m the administrator! I shouldn’t have to put in a password anytime I want to install new software! Why does it make me do this when this account is an admin?! It was indignant and it was also a remarkably stupid take from someone who had more hubris than wisdom. Whether people acknowledge it or not, they’re always making compromises when it comes to their computers. It’s easy to be heavily critical of the things that you experience on a day to day basis. Little bugs that are really starting to piss you off. The software making you jump through some extra hoop just to do what you want it to. It’s less easy to see the major downsides of the “other side” if you’re not there. The author of this article seems defeated and stuck between a rock and hard place. On the one hand he gets the Mac with its limited expandability, limited hardware options, and high prices. On the other hand he has a linux box with unremarkable to bad UX but with the ability to outfit it with (relatively) cheap and powerful commodity hardware. Perhaps the vast majority of disillusioned Mac users are simply unaware of all the controversies and issues that have cropped up in PC land. They’re unable to see over those high walls and simply assume it’s better on the outside. As someone that regularly uses Linux, Windows, and MacOS, I can assure you that each of them have things that absolutely delight me and then another set of things that makes me want to smash my computer on the ground and give up on them entirely. You may find some relief to the issues you have now. I guarantee you will just be replacing them with something else, though.
adamretter 6y ago
I feel exactly the same way. My 2019 MBP is probably the last Mac I will buy, it's my 3rd MBP since 2008. Each time, I have upgraded, it's felt like a worse experience.
yannovitch 6y ago
Seeing where the industry is going, I'm thinking more and more of having "one computer per purpose" rather than trying to have "one computer to rule them all" (and in the darkness bind them, ahem, sorry, I digress ^^). To explain a bit more, I do writing, development, photo editing, video editing, music production. Nowadays, my sole computer (besides multiple Raspberry Pi) is a gaming laptop running Windows. It can handle all of these tasks. Before that, I had a 2012 MBP, but when I wanted to upgrade to an other mac with 32GB RAM, a good graphic card and Thunderbolt 3 in the end of 2015/beginning of 2016, the option of that much RAM and a good video card just wasn't there at the time, and so I switched to the Windows world again. I've been able to upgrade the gaming computer over the years to 32 GB RAM, I now have 3 (!) SSD in the computer, and it runs what I want quickly enough (except for Lightroom, but that's an other story ;)). But for development, the feeling just isn't there, even with WSL/WSL2, it's just not as straightforward as macOS with homebrew or macports, not to talk about Debian or Archlinux which are even better, so for me, it always feel like "death by a thousand cut" to develop on Windows platform. For video, ProresRAW is only available on Apple, and I want to futureproof my future cameras in that aspect too. Or maybe I could go the BlackmagicRAW path to be able to do it in the Windows or Linux world, or converting to Prores4444, but ProresRAW and BlackmagicRAW don't seem to like each others, and in video, I don't want to spend my time fighting the computers and the codecs. So I'll probably have to switch to Mac in the long run for that. For the sound part, in my point of view, there is still nothing coming close to Mac with CoreAudio, even if Linux is good (with Jack & cie), macOS is miles ahead when it comes for example to plugin or DAW support. And in Windows, it's still not as good as mac for Audio, at least in my perspective. For the photography part, Darktable is getting good and faster than Lightroom, but still not as efficient in workflow than Lightroom or Capture One. Buuut it's getting close. So I think more and more of buying one laptop just for Linux & development (or even stripping a Chromebook of Chrome OS and installing Linux on it ?). Use my iPad for writing, because it's the most enjoyable "sit on a couch and write" experience. And maybe buy a M1 (or M2) Mac for Audio, Video, Photo. There still remain the question of buying a beefy workstation with for example 128GB RAM and beefy graphic card and 10GBe and RAID, to handle the big audio/video/photo project. I wanted to go the Hackintosh route, but now with ARM, I don't know if it's a futureproof purchase...
new_realist 6y ago
Young people still like Macs. It’s only older folks who ask who moved their cheese.
lupinglade 6y ago
This is all true. Wish Apple wasn’t destroying macOS so much. Things used to be so much better in terms of user experience, clean APIs and features. Everything is over-policed, buggy and ugly now, especially in Big Sur. Apple’s attention to detail is gone.
jnvisbalco 6y ago
The article and some of the comments seem to be missing the point. The new M1 chips are Apple's first foray into developing their own silicon for computers, these are not the laptops specialized users want. BUT the new Air can compile Rust in half the time as the 16" MBP, Tensorflow it many times faster, 1.5 hours of web browsing and YouTube depleted only 4% battery. And that's just less than a week of testing. This is the biggest proof yet that Apple's approach to hardware+software was always the right one for them. Now, I do disagree with the increasing control they exert, how they prevent you from upgrading directly or installing other OSes. I hope they start to care more about developers and tinkerers in the future. I've always loved Windows and Linux, and I've gone back to it after trying a MacBook, but I can't deny what they have achieved with the M1 has given me second though about using an MBP as my main computer in the future.
jaredcwhite 6y ago
Feels like the heyday of articles about abandoning the Mac platform passed a couple of years ago. The Mac is in better shape now than it's ever been, and the M1-era is going to be jaw-dropping. Hey, use whatever you want, it's fine…but I don't think there's any systemic issue with the State of The Mac in 2020 in the way there was back in the trashcan Mac Pro and butterfly keyboard era of hardware stagnation.
- lawik 6y ago
  As the author, I think you are right. It isn't stagnant. But it also isn't a good fit for me in the tradeoffs it makes. M1 has promising performance but intensifies my already painful dongle town situation. To me Apple are making 50/50 good and bad moves but they are maybe hitting 25/75 for my use cases. So they are losing me.
bfrog 6y ago
Gnome 3 to me is hard to beat gui wise... Add a window tiler and I don't even think about it being there. It just damn well works.
frollo 6y ago
I was moved, quite against my will, into the Mac field three years ago, by the company I was working for. It didn't start as my cup of tea, but I eventually got used to it. Hell, I even started enjoying using my MBP. It checked the right boxes in my list. Since Catalina, it doesn't anymore. Or, at least it doesn't check as much boxes as it used to. And, frankly, it's not worth the cost anymore. I could justify the expense for an used 2015 MBP, which felt like a slick and comfortable machine. Can I justify the expense for another Mac, now that it feels distinctly uncomfortable?

54 points by lawik 6y ago

The time to stop allowing yourself to be exploited is ever and always right now. Last year might have been better, but a year from now you could think that again. Now is the best you can ever do.

rleigh 6y ago

Hard to argue with any of his points, I've felt the same way about the state of Mac hardware and software for even longer. The software quality has been on a slow but sure slide for well over a decade at this point. The quality of Catalina is not good. Recently I've been using it more and have regular system crashes. There are serious bugs in the kernel. Big Sur looks like another step down in polish and quality. "More iOS" is simply bad strategy for a desktop operating system. I want a tool for professional work, not a locked down and dumbed down entertainment appliance. 10-15 years back, paying the premium for an Apple system got you a premium product. And back then, the premium was not excessive for the gain in hardware build quality and the software. Today, that is no longer the case. The value proposition is just not there. You're paying very inflated amounts of money for mediocre performance, nice looking but sorely limited hardware, and bad quality software.

beagle3 6y ago
> Today, that is no longer the case. My feeling is the opposite: There used to be an Apple hardware premium that was not (to me) justifiable at the time. But as the software slowly declines, so does the premium - it feels to me like the M1 macs are priced with almost no premium anymore - there is nothing comparable right now (battery-life-wise, processors-speed-wise), but even with the Intel ones, a similarly specced base hardware is similarly priced (and the mac has much higher build quality than e.g. dell and hp in my experience). The place where you still pay Apple premium is the upgrades (more memory, more disk). But overall, there's isn't much of a premium paid anymore when buying an Apple.
- theklr 6y ago
  You know these are the low tier macs right? They did the same with the first intels...I am really concerned with us collectively having such poor recency bias. We’re only at the beginning of the transition. These macs they replaced were already bottom feeders and their punching above their weight. Give them by this time next year and we’ll have a better argument to form.
- banachtarski 6y ago
  Counterpoint, would you buy a machine in 2020 to service as a developer laptop or desktop with 8 gb of ram and 512 gb of storage? Saying that the premiums are "just the upgrades" sort of ignores what those upgrades actually are and how much they cost.
  - danmur 6y ago
    Not really related but I got a surface pro to replace an Android tablet and even though I'm a native Linux user I find myself doing some light dev work on it. It's quite pleasant even with only 8gb of RAM. It only cost $700 though. If it was more expensive if be pretty unhappy about all the many, many deficiencies. My partner has a new MacBook, a lot more expensive, and the performance is atrocious.
  - aldanor 6y ago
    512GB for a dev laptop? Yes I would. For 16GB RAM you pay +$200, even with that added the total price is still pretty low given what you get.
  - bfrog 6y ago
    Wait, the base spec has 8gb? Can you even start chrome up on there? I'd be scared of running out with chrome and a few tabs....
    - jason0597 6y ago
      I've been running Chrome on my Arch desktop with 8GiB of RAM just fine for the last couple of years. Usually averaging to 20 tabs
porker 6y ago
I don't know what exactly Jobs did, but post-Jobs was when I felt the software quality start to slide. I assume he had amazing attention to detail.
- cJ0th 6y ago
  I assume that Apple's next chapter started coincidently with the leaving of Steve Jobs. Of course, I do not know if Jobs would be cool with today's Apple. But he certainly worked hard at turning it into the cash cow it is nowadays. So in other words, we are in a different cell of the BCG Matrix today.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  "It's not that Steve was magical. It's that he was f*ing terrifying."
  - fzil 6y ago
    you have source on that quote? I searched and couldn't find anything.
    - Turing_Machine 6y ago
      Sorry, I don't. Vague memory says it was something someone said in a Facebook comment thread. Not very helpful, I know.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Gys 6y ago
You (and I) are clearly not the target market. 95% (guessing) of the people use their computer only for email/browsing and gaming. Apple is a premium brand for them, bought as a statement (I am cool, or something). People pay premium for most things: clothing, watches, cars, etc. Many of these more expensive things we buy do not differ much of the competition, except for being a well known brand.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

toyg 6y ago

I am heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem: MBP, iPhone, iPad, tons of apps. But I’ve decided I’m out. Ryzen-based machines have caught up; Windows has caught up; and I’m willing to give the Linux desktop the benefit of the doubt again. Every new macOS release I feel more and more boiled to death, more locked in, more exploited than before. Even the eyecandy, which was what I loved OSX from the very first release, is now utterly terrible and getting worse release after release. I was happy to pay a premium for a premium platform, but this is not what I’ve been getting in the last 5 years - what I’ve been getting is a support role to the iPhone ecosystem that is the alpha and the omega of Apple’s strategy, and more and more restrictions to satisfy this role. Obviously this is good for them, but it just isn’t for me, so I’m out.

mosselman 6y ago
Give Pop!_OS a try. It is great for gaming. I have a very old Intel i5 (2500k) and a Nvidia GTX 970 (I think) and I have a very solid gaming experience with Steam Play on it. Pop!_OS is Ubuntu based but with Flatpak instead of Snap and without the Ubuntu calling home stuff. Meaning it is great for development. Last time I tried developing on Windows I remember being very frustrated. Now I don't have Windows installed on anything and I am happier for it.
- apareis 6y ago
  Do as I did and play with the various distros in VirtualBox for a bit. Have a careful look at the Desktop Environment, i.e., which one suits you. Doesn't take long to figure out whether a distro is for you or not. If you don't like it from trying coming from a Mac, then it won't be good enough for the long haul. I've tried so fedora, Pop!_OS, elementary, KDE Neon. As a long term Ubuntu / Debian (server) user I was used to apt but would be open to other package managers. Based on my trials, I'm probably going to go ahead with KDE Neon, that is Ubuntu with KDE Plasma Desktop. This seems to be a nice cross-over between Windows 10 and MacOS with sane defaults but enough options to tailor it to my liking.
falseAss 6y ago
Did you find any decent alternative laptop? I find my daily routines have been deeply overfitted to macbook/macOS on a firmware level. The sunk cost can be quite staggering for users like me.

mam2 6y ago

I have never nderstood people buying Apple. Some people here mention paying a premium for a premium service but i dont see it: - best case scenario you buy a tech which is 1 year ahead in quality, but if you buy a computer for min 5 years this reasoning makes not so much sense to me. - you still have a thousand limitations such as games, compatibility with other devices, being locked in and the planned slowdown of devices when new releases are here.. Most people i know who had apple computers or phones did not even buy it for argument 1. They were just laypeople who just bought it because they thought it was cool, and actually were surprised by all the limitations afterward. To apple only made their money on the power of FAME and "coolness" only. I dont see how the "product" has ever been any better at any point. (Ok except the iphone in the first smartphone years.)

thatswrong0 6y ago
I’m a developer, I’m a music producer, I almost exclusively use touch pads, I hate Windows, and in general I don’t want to futz around with my operating system. I want shit to just work and I don’t want my OS to constantly badger me and show me ads. So yeah, I’ll stick with my Mac purely because it is “cool” even though it has sooo many limitations that make it unbearable to use on a daily basis
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I understand it as a music producer because of Logic, but I don't understand it as a developer. At all to be honest.
  - spiderfarmer 6y ago
    Being a developer doesn't automatically mean you should hate Apple. I'm a developer, and I don't.
    - raxxorrax 6y ago
      I don't hate Apple, I recommend it for certain users. But it cannot really supply me with anything that isn't available to me while maintaining more freedom and flexibility. I also don't like to develop against their environment since I think it to be too restrictive.

autocorr 6y ago

Just a note for anyone thinking about transitioning from macOS to a Linux desktop workstation, like the author here: I would advise against using "as light a desktop environment as I can stomach". Full-featured desktops like KDE and Gnome are comparatively light on resources and also simplify your personal system administration considerably. If you want to customize everything, by all means! :) That's the beauty of Free Software. But despite what you may remember from 10+ years ago, KDE today is definitely not "heavy".

spiderfarmer 6y ago

It feels like how older tech nerds get, the more nostalgic and conservative they become. Remember when your parents said "everything is moving so quickly, and it's not getting better"? You're now reaching a point in live where you wish for simpler times. Apple is not perfect. I also agree their quality is getting worse. I understand why people say that everything used to be better. But their customers can now do things with their hard- and software that we couldn't imagine 10 years ago. That progress has a cost. Apple can't be everything to everyone. They're fine with the churn rate as it is.

8fingerlouie 6y ago
“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” ― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
- masswerk 6y ago
  Regarding 3) However, this time it's not solely about tech, but about workflows. Apple was once leading in human-computer symbiosis, now, seeing Big Sur, Apple has become actually bad about this. (I get that Apple is now a media house, but the Big iOS won't do for all purposes. A computer, and we may say, historically especially the Mac, isn't only about consuming and a virtual kaleidoscope, it's also the universal means of production since a few decades ago.)
  - 8fingerlouie 6y ago
    What's so bad about Big Sur (except the bypassing firewalls) ? From what little experience i have with it (being recently released), everything still just works as expected. They changed the layout of a few things, but at least from my usage perspective it still works every bit as well as the previous versions. Granted, i mostly use mail, text editors, terminals and browsers with the occational hobby photo editing and 3d printing slicers, but for my programming and photo workflows it still fits the bill nicely. I use Windows 10 at work every day, and while it runs well enough there are still countless "little things" that bug me. About 10-15 years ago i stopped doing "point and click" to open applications, and instead rely on Spotlight to find and open apps. This works 99% of the time. On windows ... not so much. Press the windows key, start typing, and it either doesn't find what you're trying to open, or it finds it, but in the time it takes my brain to register the correct result i have typed another (correct) letter, and the wanted result is gone, replaced by some annoying Bing website. Control Panel ? Why do we need 3-4 of them ?

Nashooo 6y ago

What would be a good laptop alternative to the MBP 2019? I really prefer UNIX over windows for development but enjoy windows for the 'office' software. OSX really hits the sweet spot in between for me. What would you recommend windows with WSL2 or VM? Archlinux dual-boot?

tga 6y ago
ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen3 would be a direct alternative. Also look at X1 Carbon (lighter but only 16GB RAM), T-series (cheaper but heavier), P-series (performance, but big and expensive).
1_player 6y ago
Going from 3 years in the Mac world back to Arch Linux was too much of a shock to bear. Plenty of stuff is still unpolished, in flux, making for a subpar desktop experience. I'm on WSL2 now and honestly, I'm loving it.

8fingerlouie 6y ago

As an "old fart" that has used just about every operating system for the past 30 years (OS/2, BeOS and Linux included), i switched to Macs around the time OS/X was released. Besides the "keyboardgate" on recent Macbook Pro's, i don't really have any complaints about the hardware. Maybe it's getting worse, but still way ahead of the generic PC vendor quality. I have a 2009 MBP that still sees daily use, and still fulfills a purpose (not it's original one). I can't say that for any of my regular laptops. Just a simple thing as the touchpad. On my Mac it "just works" as i expect it to, and rarely gets in my way. I've yet to meet a generic PC touchpad that doesn't annoy me in 30 seconds or less. As for the software. I can't really say it's gotten worse. I rarely experience crashes on my Macs, and kernel panics has been maybe 3-4 times in a decade. Most of the time i open up my Macbook, do "stuff", and close the lid again. It auto installs software updates whenever it's charging and not being used, and automatically reboots and resumes whatever windows i had open (minus terminal windows), so from a user perspective i never reboot it. It integrates well with my iPhone, Airpods, iPad, and even Apple TVs. Yes i'm aware competing technologies exists, and individually they may even perform better, but they don't integrate fully with each other. As for Apple, it "just works". Apple may be a popular target, but they're still a lot better than the alternatives, especially if you're dug in deep in their eco system.

woof 6y ago
Old fart here too. I have the exact same experience as you, and even after using Linux om multiple machines for 20+ years (desktops, laptops and servers) I still prefer Macs and MacOS. Changed work recently and went back to my late 2013 MacBook Pro for a few months. It still works great with Big Sur - try that on a 7 years old PC... And I love my 2 days old MacBook Pro m1, the keyboard is perfect and the esc-key is as God intended it (yeah, for emacs...).
visarga 6y ago
> As for Apple, it "just works". Counterpoint - I have an MBP and AirPods and often I can't connect them together. Both produced by the same company, yet quite unreliable together. It's probably related to the shitty BT implementation, or WiFi noise. But to sell expensive headphones that fail at producing, you know, ... sound, it's quite a feat. And on this MBP model there's no wired microphone input, because aesthetics, or just to save a penny.

masswerk 6y ago

I'd love to see a Mac restart for those who actually work with and on the computer. – Think NeXt for the 2020s.

least 6y ago

For many people, Apple offered laptops that they felt checked the right boxes for their needs and now they don’t. Whenever Apple makes a change to the operating system people come out of the wood works to chip in their 2 cents about how much worse everything is now and how much better it all used to be back when they first fell in love with the Mac. Apple made it marginally more difficult for power users to install software they want on their computer so that must be an indication of their move to walling off the software ecosystem on the mac! It’s a one time one extra step for something that is a relative rarity, running unsigned applications. Unless all you do all day is download and run unsigned .dmg files from github, this seems like a remarkably rare occurrence that you have to address. MacOS now defaults to being rootless! System Integrity Protection clearly exists to restrict me from running any code I want on MY COMPUTER! Well, except that it can be turned off by anyone who knows and cares to do so (i.e. the power user) while retaining the security benefits that it gives to the vast majority of users that don’t need the functionality it provides. Nearly any move apple has made that at a cursory glance looks to be being made to close off the Mac software ecosystem hasn’t actually stopped people from running arbitrary code on the OS. It’s some weird sense of entitlement that power users seem to have and they get indignant that they have to change their behavior at all. I remember when I first tried linux from Windows and the whole idea of having to sudo to install software made me upset. I’m the administrator! I shouldn’t have to put in a password anytime I want to install new software! Why does it make me do this when this account is an admin?! It was indignant and it was also a remarkably stupid take from someone who had more hubris than wisdom. Whether people acknowledge it or not, they’re always making compromises when it comes to their computers. It’s easy to be heavily critical of the things that you experience on a day to day basis. Little bugs that are really starting to piss you off. The software making you jump through some extra hoop just to do what you want it to. It’s less easy to see the major downsides of the “other side” if you’re not there. The author of this article seems defeated and stuck between a rock and hard place. On the one hand he gets the Mac with its limited expandability, limited hardware options, and high prices. On the other hand he has a linux box with unremarkable to bad UX but with the ability to outfit it with (relatively) cheap and powerful commodity hardware. Perhaps the vast majority of disillusioned Mac users are simply unaware of all the controversies and issues that have cropped up in PC land. They’re unable to see over those high walls and simply assume it’s better on the outside. As someone that regularly uses Linux, Windows, and MacOS, I can assure you that each of them have things that absolutely delight me and then another set of things that makes me want to smash my computer on the ground and give up on them entirely. You may find some relief to the issues you have now. I guarantee you will just be replacing them with something else, though.

adamretter 6y ago

I feel exactly the same way. My 2019 MBP is probably the last Mac I will buy, it's my 3rd MBP since 2008. Each time, I have upgraded, it's felt like a worse experience.

yannovitch 6y ago

Seeing where the industry is going, I'm thinking more and more of having "one computer per purpose" rather than trying to have "one computer to rule them all" (and in the darkness bind them, ahem, sorry, I digress ^^). To explain a bit more, I do writing, development, photo editing, video editing, music production. Nowadays, my sole computer (besides multiple Raspberry Pi) is a gaming laptop running Windows. It can handle all of these tasks. Before that, I had a 2012 MBP, but when I wanted to upgrade to an other mac with 32GB RAM, a good graphic card and Thunderbolt 3 in the end of 2015/beginning of 2016, the option of that much RAM and a good video card just wasn't there at the time, and so I switched to the Windows world again. I've been able to upgrade the gaming computer over the years to 32 GB RAM, I now have 3 (!) SSD in the computer, and it runs what I want quickly enough (except for Lightroom, but that's an other story ;)). But for development, the feeling just isn't there, even with WSL/WSL2, it's just not as straightforward as macOS with homebrew or macports, not to talk about Debian or Archlinux which are even better, so for me, it always feel like "death by a thousand cut" to develop on Windows platform. For video, ProresRAW is only available on Apple, and I want to futureproof my future cameras in that aspect too. Or maybe I could go the BlackmagicRAW path to be able to do it in the Windows or Linux world, or converting to Prores4444, but ProresRAW and BlackmagicRAW don't seem to like each others, and in video, I don't want to spend my time fighting the computers and the codecs. So I'll probably have to switch to Mac in the long run for that. For the sound part, in my point of view, there is still nothing coming close to Mac with CoreAudio, even if Linux is good (with Jack & cie), macOS is miles ahead when it comes for example to plugin or DAW support. And in Windows, it's still not as good as mac for Audio, at least in my perspective. For the photography part, Darktable is getting good and faster than Lightroom, but still not as efficient in workflow than Lightroom or Capture One. Buuut it's getting close. So I think more and more of buying one laptop just for Linux & development (or even stripping a Chromebook of Chrome OS and installing Linux on it ?). Use my iPad for writing, because it's the most enjoyable "sit on a couch and write" experience. And maybe buy a M1 (or M2) Mac for Audio, Video, Photo. There still remain the question of buying a beefy workstation with for example 128GB RAM and beefy graphic card and 10GBe and RAID, to handle the big audio/video/photo project. I wanted to go the Hackintosh route, but now with ARM, I don't know if it's a futureproof purchase...

new_realist 6y ago

Young people still like Macs. It’s only older folks who ask who moved their cheese.

lupinglade 6y ago

This is all true. Wish Apple wasn’t destroying macOS so much. Things used to be so much better in terms of user experience, clean APIs and features. Everything is over-policed, buggy and ugly now, especially in Big Sur. Apple’s attention to detail is gone.

jnvisbalco 6y ago

The article and some of the comments seem to be missing the point. The new M1 chips are Apple's first foray into developing their own silicon for computers, these are not the laptops specialized users want. BUT the new Air can compile Rust in half the time as the 16" MBP, Tensorflow it many times faster, 1.5 hours of web browsing and YouTube depleted only 4% battery. And that's just less than a week of testing. This is the biggest proof yet that Apple's approach to hardware+software was always the right one for them. Now, I do disagree with the increasing control they exert, how they prevent you from upgrading directly or installing other OSes. I hope they start to care more about developers and tinkerers in the future. I've always loved Windows and Linux, and I've gone back to it after trying a MacBook, but I can't deny what they have achieved with the M1 has given me second though about using an MBP as my main computer in the future.

jaredcwhite 6y ago

Feels like the heyday of articles about abandoning the Mac platform passed a couple of years ago. The Mac is in better shape now than it's ever been, and the M1-era is going to be jaw-dropping. Hey, use whatever you want, it's fine…but I don't think there's any systemic issue with the State of The Mac in 2020 in the way there was back in the trashcan Mac Pro and butterfly keyboard era of hardware stagnation.

lawik 6y ago
As the author, I think you are right. It isn't stagnant. But it also isn't a good fit for me in the tradeoffs it makes. M1 has promising performance but intensifies my already painful dongle town situation. To me Apple are making 50/50 good and bad moves but they are maybe hitting 25/75 for my use cases. So they are losing me.

bfrog 6y ago

Gnome 3 to me is hard to beat gui wise... Add a window tiler and I don't even think about it being there. It just damn well works.

frollo 6y ago

I was moved, quite against my will, into the Mac field three years ago, by the company I was working for. It didn't start as my cup of tea, but I eventually got used to it. Hell, I even started enjoying using my MBP. It checked the right boxes in my list. Since Catalina, it doesn't anymore. Or, at least it doesn't check as much boxes as it used to. And, frankly, it's not worth the cost anymore. I could justify the expense for an used 2015 MBP, which felt like a slick and comfortable machine. Can I justify the expense for another Mac, now that it feels distinctly uncomfortable?