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Apple: Great hardware, barely tolerable software.

• gentle 4y ago
  The hardware looks nice but it's not for normal people getting normal work done. Things have gotten marginally better since Ive left, but they still have a long way to go.
  • zer01 4y ago
    I disagree, having migrated multiple family members away from shitty plastic laptops full of bloat ware and ads and shitty Android phones full of the same they are much more able to use their devices. I also find as a dev that iPhones and MacBooks “just work” and let me get my stuff done, much much more so than a Linux desktop environment or windows laptop. I guess we may be talking about different things though if you’re saying the apple ecosystem isn’t living up to its full potential, but IMO the rest of the phone/computer ecosystem is full of cheap shitty plastic crap with windows installs that OEMs have had free reign to install whatever they want on (and even without that, why tf when I install windows 10 do I get ads for “candy crush” on my start menu?!)
    • jeroenhd 4y ago
      Comparing Apple's hardware to shitty plastic laptops is a false equivalence though. Once you spend Apple money on hardware, you get much better stuff in return. Apple is perceived to be high quality because they only serve the high end. When you compare ecosystems, you should at least compare the same market segment. There are also market segments that Apple has no products in (convertibles, for examples, or sub 600 dollar laptops). Candy crush hasn't been installed by default for years now. There's plenty wrong with Windows 11, but the spam has severely reduced and the user experience has improved in many points (and made worse in others, i.e. not being able to dock the task bar to the side, though you can't do that on macOS either).
      • donarb 4y ago
        > not being able to dock the task bar to the side, though you can't do that on macOS either In System Preferences > General you can set the dock to the left, right or bottom of the screen.
      • AnthonBerg 4y ago
        I have honestly, earnestly tried. I have tried to find a laptop that is for my needs and purposes truly equivalent to an Apple Macbook Pro. Or better. I always end up going with an Apple machine. There has always been a significant part of the assembly that just isn’t as good. It’s often disk speed or display quality. Build quality too. I want to underline that this is true for what I need out of a laptop. The opposite has been true in desktops. I have a Ryzen 3900X box and there still isn’t anything from Apple that I would replace it with. Not even to run macOS on it (which I do on the AMD box, using GPU passthrough).
        • JimmyAustin 4y ago
          Depending on your workload, the Mac Studio would be the replacement for a 3900X box. It's not a GPU powerhouse, and lacks expandability though.
          • AnthonBerg 4y ago
            That’s exactly it :)
        • microtonal 4y ago
          The opposite has been true in desktops. I have a Ryzen 3900X box and there still isn’t anything from Apple that I would replace it with. Not even to run macOS on it (which I do on the AMD box, using GPU passthrough). My MacBook Pro 14" is pretty much on-par with my Ryzen 5900X CPU-wise (the M1 Ultra would surpass it by a wide margin). The GPU of the M1 Max is nothing to sneeze at, but I'd love it if they'd bring eGPU support to the M1 line. (And if one can dream, if NVIDIA would also make CUDA available.)
          • 4y ago
    • sschueller 4y ago
      If you spend apple prices on PC hardware you will get more performance and a lot less plastic crap.
      • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        I think you mean a lot more plastic crap, right? For a PC laptop of the same price (eg Lenovo X1), I find that they are a lot more flimsy than a aluminum unibody construction. In fact, I mostly moved to Apple to get away from plastic. If I’m wrong and you have specific examples, let me know. But the last time I checked, PC quality price per price was still pretty bad compared to Apple.
        • howinteresting 4y ago
          A Lenovo X1 can handle spills unlike an Apple laptop. That's what build quality is about.
      • ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
        This has been debunked time and time again over the years; when you spec out something truly similar, the price is more or less the same.
        • lynndotpy 4y ago
          Wait, what? I think I'm missing something because the price difference is still there. This argument is old as the hills but has generally held up. The 2020 MBA (to avoid having arguments comparing ARM and x64 cpus) launched at $1000 started at a 256GB disk, 1.1GHz two-core i3, and 8GB of RAM. A quick search will find the 2020 Acer Swift 3, $700, with a 512GB disk, 1.8GHz eight-core Ryzen 7, and 8GB of RAM. It looks pretty sleek, metal, and thin too. I do mean this sincerely, am I missing something? Because I don't know of any perspective where the price-spec gap disappears with Apple laptops. When people talk about buying Apple "for the hardware", I really don't think the argument is about the specs.
          • 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
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• jchw 4y ago
  I really feel this way. The two Apple products I own are an iPhone, and an M1 Mac Mini. The hardware is good. The software often thwarts things I'm trying to do and pisses me off greatly. At least on the Mac Mini though, I can disable SIP and go crazy, or install Asahi Linux. iPhone is gimped really hard and even a $100/yr developer license doesn't really help you that much; you're still not getting basic WebM in Safari or alternate browser engines. I know it's popular to not like Android for being janky, not as privacy-respecting, fragmented, or simply because of the fact that it's Google, but I don't really mind Android that much, even given all of its faults. It's mildly annoying but at the end of the day it feels like there's very little that I simply can't do. I mostly use Google devices, so I can always root and flash other ROMs.
  • krzyk 4y ago
    Yeah, Android is much more hacker friendly than iPhone with its closed ecosystem. iPhones and Macs is more for people that don't want to tinker with their hardware/software.
    • pcthrowaway 4y ago
      > iPhones and Macs is more for people that don't want to tinker with their hardware/software. The author of this article notwithstanding
  • davidro80 4y ago
    Hey fyi webm support is native in iPhone safari now. Noticed it a few days ago when I was surfing an image board and suddenly I could click and play them.
    • jchw 4y ago
      Thanks for letting me know. Unfortunately, I suspect that the website you were viewing was either transparently decoding the webm in JS or transcoding it on the server; I can’t find any info suggesting MobileSafari supports WebM in any version, and I just updated my iPhone but I still get a negative result over here: https://www.webmproject.org/detect/ https://www.webmproject.org/detect/ If you get a positive result, please let me know. I would be willing to jump to a beta for that…
• mpweiher 4y ago
  The way I put it is that with hardware, Apple had their "come to Jesus" moment a couple of years ago. With software, they're still Johnny Ive^H^H^HSwift: just as cocksure as to how perfect they are as they are actually bad. It used to not be that way at all. They had OK-ish hardware that was basically a dongle for the awesome software.
• teddyh 4y ago
  Apple used to be an oddity; a hardware company that was also good at software. If they are now reverting, it’s at least reassuring to see that the conventional wisdom still holds; i.e. that companies can be good at software or hardware, but never both.
• intsunny 4y ago
  > Apple: Great hardware, barely tolerable software. I think this is more accurate: Apple: great hardware, software better than the low low bar set by everyone else Linux ships with 2394230 desktops, and Windows apparently isn't even designed by people who use actually use Windows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
  • withinboredom 4y ago
    I’ve worked for a few dev shops now where the entire company uses Apple but over 90% of the customers interfacing with the software are on windows.
  • howinteresting 4y ago
    At least on Gnome, animation speeds aren't dependent on the aspect ratio of your monitor. macOS is an embarrassment of a system to actually use day-to-day.
  • peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > software better than the low low bar set by everyone else as a former Mac user, I think Mac software is kinda great on ways other systems cannot keep up: constant upgrades, function over form without sacrificing form, when an old/surpassed API is deprecated, community reacts very fast. But Apple software and especially MacOS? Not really.
  • seba_dos1 4y ago
    > software better than the low low bar set by everyone else You mean, "set by you". It doesn't pass the higher bar set by me, which is easily passed by Plasma.
• ajkjk 4y ago
  Better software than windows, though. Every time I go back to a Windows machine I'm traumatized by something that should be trivial within like the first hour. The most recent example was navigating control panel menus while trying to figure out why a microphone wasn't picking up my voice. Somehow every tiny management task like that is an absolute disaster on Windows.
  • loeg 4y ago
    OS X disables volume control if you're playing on an HDMI monitor, for no particular reason. I don't think it's clear that Windows is worse in this area.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      modern macOS can also semi-silently deny an application access to the mic. It's not a stupid thing to do, but it certainly can confuse the crap out of users who missed the "allow X to use mic" popup in the past.
      • radicality 4y ago
        Another thing that’s confusing to me is similarly with some applications requesting access to folders. I swear I’ve had situations where I download some software, and then I try open with it some file in my Downloads folder. OSX then shows a pop about requesting access. I remember either just ignoring that pop up or clicking cancel, and then still having the software somehow load the file! That seemed like a serious security issue and I don’t really trust those filesystem access protections on osx anymore.
        • kalleboo 4y ago
          macOS will allow access to single files to software without any permissions if the action to open the file was deliberately done by the user (e.g. the file was selected in an OS open file dialog, the file was double-clicked, or dragged onto the app icon, etc). The app gets a runtime-limited lock on that one file and still can't willy-nilly list or read other files. IIRC this is also the only run-mode for sandboxed App Store apps, where all file opens must be user-initiated (and some utility apps work around this by asking you to open the disk root manually)
• torstenvl 4y ago
  Apple: Great hardware. Great software. Terrible combination. I like Windows on Bootcamp. I like hackintoshes and my 2015 MacBook Pro. It's trying to bend macOS to my will on recent systems that causes wailing and gnashing of teeth. I wish there were some kind of mechanism to maintain current levels of system security while allowing previous levels of freedom. Maybe a way to sign a Yubikey and the Recovery partition with an Apple Developer account, after which booting with the Yubikey on that system would allow you to, e.g., install an older version of macOS, or make changes to /System.
  • swozey 4y ago
    I was on this boat too, building hackintoshes, etc until the M1 came out. I refused to ever buy an actual Apple machine, especially since work gives me one to use for work/coding. I'm sold on the m1 though, miraculous little device, love my 14" powerhouse. M1 max, 64gb ram.. And I have PORTS again. I used the HDMI port the first day I got the machine. Expensive af but it'll hopefully last me 5+ years.