4 ms·
Just to be clear: This perfectly fine experience you describe is also exactly the experience of 99% of Apple users, including me. You only hear the ones that co
by crubier 5y ago
Just to be clear: This perfectly fine experience you describe is also exactly the experience of 99% of Apple users, including me. You only hear the ones that complain.
- leephillips 5y agoThe ones that don’t complain have low standards. When I switched, although OSX was pretty solid, it was trading frequently spinning beachballs for the first consistently responsive computer I’d ever used. I had come to regard macOS sluggishness as normal, as do most Mac users, because they haven’t experienced anything better.
- rad_gruchalski 5y agoThanks for telling me that I have low standards. Amazing considering MacBooks on my desk.
- pivo 5y ago> The ones that don’t complain have low standards. Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.
- DandyDev 5y agoIs this sort of sweeping generalization really necessary? I can tell you that it's not true in any case. I'm one of those Mac users that doesn't complain about performance, because I rarely see the spinning beach ball.
- jrochkind1 5y agoI haven't seen a spinning beachball on MacOS in years. I'm not even sure it still exists anymore. But also only rarely have a sluggish system, with or without a spinning beachball.
- emkoemko 5y agowhat are spinning beach balls? i don't understand? like BSOD ?
- saagarjha 5y agoA cursor indicating the frontmost application is unresponsive.
- joeman1000 5y agoDefinitely still exists. I get it in emacs sometimes (god only knows why).
- jrochkind1 5y agoGood to know! I definitely have not seen it in years! (two 2015 Macbooks running Catalina with 16GB).
- spicybright 5y agoLol. Sorry your own experience was bad. Doesn't mean everyone had the same experience as you though. I ran windows, then linux for ~4 years as a daily driver, switched to mac about a year ago. I do back end/front end development full time for work + work on many performance sensitive personal projects, and couldn't be happier with the OS. It's almost like different users have different experiences based on their use cases...
- josephg 5y agoThat doesn't mean linux is any better. I built a brand new ryzen x5800 machine late last year, running linux mint. When I first built it, the computer has had duplicate unremovable mouse cursors appearing on the screen. And my trackpad sometimes randomly became unresponsive (or one time, the up and down directions flipped!). And neither suspending nor hybernating worked - the machine wouldn't come back up. All these problems have since gone away thanks to software updates and (importantly) a BIOS update. It turned out my USB controller wasn't being configured correctly by the motherboard. If I didn't happen to check for BIOS updates, I'd still have lots of problems. And that was still a better experience than the HP laptop I bought a couple of years ago. That laptop had so much HP crap preinstalled that it sat on 30% CPU usage at all times out of the box. The biggest offender was some HP process doing microphone noise reduction. It ran all the time regardless of whether or not the microphone was being used - and utterly demolished the machine's battery life. Apple is far from perfect, but they have a better reputation than most vendors for a reason. And their technical support is are excellent. I've had thousands of dollars of free hardware repairs & replacements over the years when things have broken in my apple machines. I wish they didn't break so much; and I wish they prioritised fixing software bugs over adding features internally. (APFS aside, I would trade the last 5 years of macOS features for better stability and performance in a heartbeat.) But there's a reason they're so well liked on HN. They're still pretty excellent in comparison to the competition.
- leephillips 5y agoHow well does macOS run on your home-built Ryzen machine?
- josephg 5y agoHuh? What point are you trying to make? I don't care how well macOS runs on my machine. I care how well any given computer gets out of the way and lets me get my work done. Today that means intellij, the rust compiler, firefox and nodejs. I want to spend my day working. Not futzing around with HP bloatware. Not rebooting due to apple memory leaks. And not guessing why my keyboard needs to be reconnected.
- wait_a_minute 5y agoI switched to a 13" M1 after having a Dell XPS 15 as my daily driver. I had high standards and Apple blew them out of the water. I see some beach ball on occasion, but I slam the machine hard. (8gb ram). It has been more reliable than the XPS 15.
- harry8 5y agoBetter than a Dell XPS 15 is no standard at all. The Dell XPS 15 is an utterly terrible laptop that breaks if you close the lid and put it in your bag when you get up from your seat. It's a portable desktop falsely advertised as a laptop due to its many flaws. If the best that can be said for apple is better than Dell XPS 15, that is a really, really damning review. I hope it's vastly better than that for you.
- jordanthoms 5y agoOk... so what's the laptop that can compete with the new 14 and 16 Macbook Pros then and doesn't have some stupid flaw? The issue with waking up in bags seems to be caused by Modern Standby which is on most new Windows laptops?
- CoffeeBoi 5y agoI've had multiple Asus laptops (UX305, UX330 and most recently S435UA) and all of them ran Fedora flawlessly out of the box. Granted, none of them had Nvidia GPUs which is the usual pain point of desktop Linux.
- michaelmrose 5y agoI was going to say just disable modern standby because that was totally a thing until spring 2020 when the registry key to disable it was removed. Microsoft is basically a toy OS run by incompetents without reasonable QA unfit to be anything but a launcher for stream.
- MonaroVXR 5y agoHP Z-book, some Lenovo Thinkpads and some consumer Lenovo and HP notebooks.
- chrisweekly 5y ago> "The ones that don't complain have low standards.... most Mac users... haven’t experienced anything better." That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with right there.
- TomVDB 5y agoWho am I to deny somebody the opportunity to feel superior? It’s a form of community service.
- jolux 5y ago> The ones that don’t complain have low standards. > they haven’t experienced anything better. I don't want to gratify this pointless flame any more than to say that I have used all of Windows (XP, Vista, 8, 8.1, 10), Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and macOS as my daily driver at one point or another, and I currently use macOS because I have yet to experience anything better. There is a simple explanation for your problems here: something is wrong with your system (or you are overtaxing it) if it beachballs constantly. This is not typical macOS behavior, especially not since they switched to SSDs. I actually haven’t seen a beachball in years.
- headsoup 5y agoI don't disagree with you, but you didn't exactly refute the point of 'low standards' just by using multiple OSes ;)
- jolux 5y agoMy standards are high enough that I choose to use macOS and not Linux or Windows. I make no other claims about them.
- jldl805 5y agoMore like "specific enough" instead of "high enough". Use Apple all you want but don't lie to yourself by saying Windows isn't a better, more powerful, more stable operating system. It just isn't as polished, and even that's debatable.
- cthalupa 5y agoI work daily in Linux, OSX, and Windows. If there was significant differences in responsiveness for day to day usage, I would notice. OSX is plenty responsive, and I basically never see beachballs. It's not a matter of low standards.
- lilyball 5y agoYou are confusing your own personal experience for the standard experience of macOS users. Personally, beachballs are so rare for me in the past few years that I'm always amazed when I see one.