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The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd

The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd like, but has also never crashed or glitched on me in a decade of use, so...), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Preview (I love Preview), the excellent and remarkably low-latency Terminal, Mail, et c. Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.

moreira 4y ago
> Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad. Same. It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem. Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
- brimble 4y ago
  I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on. BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
boringg 4y ago
Just started notes a couples weeks ago. Fantastic - disappointed I missed this for so long. Agree preview is great for what it is. Probably should go back to safari instead of chrome.
- brimble 4y ago
  Notes is great. One time I was like "it'd be nice to put a PDF in this note. LOL, bet that won't work" but no, of course it did, embedded it exactly like I'd hoped it would. Drag & drop, there it is, can view it inline. The two things that bug me: no markdown support, and no built-in export (but the format's simple and well known and there are existing 3rd party tools that can do it). Everything else is so good and so stable that I've been hesitant to go looking for something else to try to fill in those two features. I can live with a formatting bar and export being a little annoying if everything else is basically perfect.
jcranberry 4y ago
Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life, I would say it's adequate (except when stuff only works on Chrome, but not really safaris fault as far as I know). I dropped terminal instantly for kitty. Preview is the PDF viewer right? Will definitely say that thing is amazing. First thing I did when I got my M1 though is partition the drive and dual boot asahi though.
- brimble 4y ago
  > Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life I wish it had more and better extensions, but the battery life savings and general lighter feel/effect on overall system responsiveness is so large that I put up with that unless I really have to have better dev tools or something. All my normal browsing happens in Safari. Took me like 3 years to convert after starting to use Macs, as I initially dismissed it, but damn, it's way lighter than FF or Chrome. > Preview is the PDF viewer right? It's a lots-of-things viewer, but its PDF support is so good that it made me go from hating when something was in a PDF, which had been the state of things with every PDF viewer I'd ever used since first encountering the format some time in the 90s, to liking PDFs. It's lightweight (like most of Apple's tools, I can just leave it in the background and forget it's there), crashes are extremely rare (maybe one or two in a decade or more of use?), and it supports all kinds of nice-to-have stuff like compiling a PDF from pages of other PDFs, removing or re-ordering pages, signing, light image editing and markup capabilities, et c.
mekster 4y ago
Safari is only good for Netflix for me. It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security... Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock. Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser. Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades? Mail is great too unlike Windows' very poor default one. Windows now looks 10 years behind with no ability to catch up to the ARM standard and Linux, well, never.
- brimble 4y ago
  > Safari is only good for Netflix for me. > It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security... Yeah, it's far from perfect but it's really light on battery and is ~never the cause of beachballs while I'm using some other program, neither of which were the case with FF or Chrome, for me :-/ My ideal browser doesn't exist, but Safari definitely feels closer to it than FF or Chrome do. They get all the add-on stuff right, while Safari gets the fundamentals right. > Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock. Bizarre. I'm a dock-hider (carried over from being a start-menu-hider on Windows for years and years) and hadn't noticed that. If I open a terminal window and drag the bottom down, sure enough, there's a little bit at the bottom I can't get it to go past. Oddly, if I use Spectacle to "maximize" it or send it to the left or right half of the screen, it manages to go a little lower (still not quite all the way!), but then the top has a tiny gap, like it's splitting the bottom gap between the top and bottom. Thanks, now that will bug me forever :-) I wonder if it's got something to do with line height? > Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser. Yeah, it's no Office replacement if you need Office. I'm fortunate that it's just for my own use or for generating PDFs. They're like Abiword and Gnumeric on Linux (which were what I preferred over the bloated mess of OpenOffice on that platform) in that they're relatively lightweight but still fairly capable—except they don't crash as much and just, you know, work better. > Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades? It's straight up stupid that Preview can be an actual selling point for macOS in the year 2022, and yet, I can't point to a single similar program (or even just a PDF reader) on another desktop OS that's even close to it, and I've used tons of them over the years.
chociej 4y ago
I get and respect that this is true for some people, but goodness, I am exactly the opposite. I find all of their builtin software to be irritating and unobvious.

moreira 4y ago

> Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad. Same. It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem. Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.

brimble 4y ago
I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on. BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.

boringg 4y ago

Just started notes a couples weeks ago. Fantastic - disappointed I missed this for so long. Agree preview is great for what it is. Probably should go back to safari instead of chrome.

brimble 4y ago
Notes is great. One time I was like "it'd be nice to put a PDF in this note. LOL, bet that won't work" but no, of course it did, embedded it exactly like I'd hoped it would. Drag & drop, there it is, can view it inline. The two things that bug me: no markdown support, and no built-in export (but the format's simple and well known and there are existing 3rd party tools that can do it). Everything else is so good and so stable that I've been hesitant to go looking for something else to try to fill in those two features. I can live with a formatting bar and export being a little annoying if everything else is basically perfect.

jcranberry 4y ago

Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life, I would say it's adequate (except when stuff only works on Chrome, but not really safaris fault as far as I know). I dropped terminal instantly for kitty. Preview is the PDF viewer right? Will definitely say that thing is amazing. First thing I did when I got my M1 though is partition the drive and dual boot asahi though.

brimble 4y ago
> Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life I wish it had more and better extensions, but the battery life savings and general lighter feel/effect on overall system responsiveness is so large that I put up with that unless I really have to have better dev tools or something. All my normal browsing happens in Safari. Took me like 3 years to convert after starting to use Macs, as I initially dismissed it, but damn, it's way lighter than FF or Chrome. > Preview is the PDF viewer right? It's a lots-of-things viewer, but its PDF support is so good that it made me go from hating when something was in a PDF, which had been the state of things with every PDF viewer I'd ever used since first encountering the format some time in the 90s, to liking PDFs. It's lightweight (like most of Apple's tools, I can just leave it in the background and forget it's there), crashes are extremely rare (maybe one or two in a decade or more of use?), and it supports all kinds of nice-to-have stuff like compiling a PDF from pages of other PDFs, removing or re-ordering pages, signing, light image editing and markup capabilities, et c.

mekster 4y ago

Safari is only good for Netflix for me. It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security... Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock. Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser. Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades? Mail is great too unlike Windows' very poor default one. Windows now looks 10 years behind with no ability to catch up to the ARM standard and Linux, well, never.

brimble 4y ago
> Safari is only good for Netflix for me. > It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security... Yeah, it's far from perfect but it's really light on battery and is ~never the cause of beachballs while I'm using some other program, neither of which were the case with FF or Chrome, for me :-/ My ideal browser doesn't exist, but Safari definitely feels closer to it than FF or Chrome do. They get all the add-on stuff right, while Safari gets the fundamentals right. > Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock. Bizarre. I'm a dock-hider (carried over from being a start-menu-hider on Windows for years and years) and hadn't noticed that. If I open a terminal window and drag the bottom down, sure enough, there's a little bit at the bottom I can't get it to go past. Oddly, if I use Spectacle to "maximize" it or send it to the left or right half of the screen, it manages to go a little lower (still not quite all the way!), but then the top has a tiny gap, like it's splitting the bottom gap between the top and bottom. Thanks, now that will bug me forever :-) I wonder if it's got something to do with line height? > Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser. Yeah, it's no Office replacement if you need Office. I'm fortunate that it's just for my own use or for generating PDFs. They're like Abiword and Gnumeric on Linux (which were what I preferred over the bloated mess of OpenOffice on that platform) in that they're relatively lightweight but still fairly capable—except they don't crash as much and just, you know, work better. > Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades? It's straight up stupid that Preview can be an actual selling point for macOS in the year 2022, and yet, I can't point to a single similar program (or even just a PDF reader) on another desktop OS that's even close to it, and I've used tons of them over the years.

chociej 4y ago

I get and respect that this is true for some people, but goodness, I am exactly the opposite. I find all of their builtin software to be irritating and unobvious.