9 ms·

Mac shipments grow 10%, as all major PC brands see downturns

59 points by retskrad 3y ago

moolcool 3y ago
Today's macs are better than ever, and Windows keeps getting worse.
- josefresco 3y ago
  That might be the case, but not the cause of this small bump: "Apple’s growth in Mac shipments is said to in large part reflect constrained supply last year."
  - barbariangrunge 3y ago
    They cut m2 production in half because of low demand. So, they’re comparing themselves to a bad year
- nXqd 3y ago
  it's true. The year MAC has the best new reliable, and fast chip, PC has AMD with broken, burnt CPU / motherboard, Intel has a chip so hot to cool down.
  - yourusername 3y ago
    Even outside hardware, a fresh windows 11 install before you decrappify it is such a bad experience. Clickbait integrated into the OS, sponsored apps pre-installed like it is a $100 android phone, constant attempts to upsell you to their cloud services.
  - tayo42 3y ago
    What about the keyboard? I actually forgot how bad it was until I used one yesterday on one of the MacBooks
    - selykg 3y ago
      The new keyboards are better than the older butterfly keyboards and absolutely more reliable.
    - flohofwoe 3y ago
      The new Mac keyboards are fine really, they rolled back from the problematic butterfly keyboards to the older magic keyboards (whatever that's actually called, but it feels a lot better and is a lot more robust) - thankfully I skipped the 'butterfly era' completely when I switched from a mid-2014 13" MBP to a 14" M1 MBP.
    - sgjohnson 3y ago
      Apple had a dark period between 2016 and 2019 when the keyboards on MacBooks were complete and utter garbage, but in 2019 they admitted their mistake and dropped the butterfly keyboard. Both my work-issued 2019 16” and my personal 2023 16” have excellent keyboards.
      - tayo42 3y ago
        wow was it really in 2019 they switched back, amazing how long that stuck with me lol
        sgjohnson 3y ago
        Well, it was long 3 and a half years. Long 3 and a half years that I didn’t even feel at all because I’ve never even touched a butterfly keyboard MacBook. My previous personal MacBook was a mid-2015 15”.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      No worse than most other laptops, now. A little better than many of them. Not as good as back when Macbook Pros were still thick enough to hold a disc drive and the keys had a lot more travel, but nothing like the dark days of the very-loud, shitty-feeling, unreliable Macbook keyboards of a few years ago. Totally OK. (FWIW I use a mechanical keyboard with mine when at my desk, but I don't, like, hate life when I'm away from my desk and have to use the built-in keyboard, even if it's for a whole week. It's fine. I don't even really think about it.)
  - sliken 3y ago
    AMD had an issue, but really it was short term and has been fixed, seemed to only impact a few dozen CPUs and motherboard and only when overclocking a home built machine. Yes it made quite a bit of news and drama, but it's all fixed. With all that said Apple does have a premium product that generally "just works", is more power efficient, and has (on average) a longer life cycle than a PC.
- sschueller 3y ago
  It highly depends what you use it for. I much prefer linux on my desktop that anything else.
  - blensor 3y ago
    I know we are the minority (maybe not necessarily on HN) but if I could upvote it multiple times I would.
  - nortonham 3y ago
    yeah for me linux>>mac>>bsd>>chromebook>>windows I picked up a macbook air m1 refurbished from apple to see what the fuss is about. It's a great machine. If not for that Debian would be primary OS, as it has been for the past ~15 years. I have one mac and a bunch of thinkpads running linux and/or BSD.
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      The second asahi is in a “finished” state im running Linux on my Mac.
      - paulmd 3y ago
        ideally, Asahi would never be finished any more than Debian is. And there will always be more generations of hardware. As long as Martin and others are willing to keep running the project there’s work to be done. It’s just a question of whether it’s good enough for you or not. And honestly, for laptops, the answer so far is probably still "not". Thunderbolt not working is kind of a deal killer, for example. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Gotta say the other day I was thinking about the Mac Pro and even at only 192GB of memory, 20P/4E with some Optane SSDs and some flash behind it would absolutely tear through postgres workloads, I bet. Everyone is dumping on Mac Pro for regressing on memory capacity (after spending the last 2 years dumping on the "$50k mac" and comparing it against Threadripper builds that top out at 256GB), and asking why Mac Pro instead of Studio. Since Asahi doesn't support Thunderbolt yet, you can't use enclosures on Studio. Mac Pro is the only option for a PCIe card that Apple won't sign a driver kext for (NVIDIA cards, for example - and they do have an aarch64 driver thanks to the Tegra family!). NVIDIA glomming onto Asahi and giving it formal support instead of going their own way with L4T/Jetson Linux would be an interesting course of events. It is, after all, just ARM64/AArch64 under the hood.
- jetrink 3y ago
  Anecdotally, even the non-technical people in my life are starting to notice the decline of Windows after updating to Windows 11. My aunt, for example, has been a Windows user since her first computer in the 1990s and she recently told me that while she dreads learning a new operating system, she's planning to get a MacBook when it's time for a new laptop. I'm also a lifelong Windows user, but I told her that it was a good decision. I don't see a future for Windows.
  - moolcool 3y ago
    Remember the ultra-cheap Windows XP machines that came loaded with weird bloatware? That's what a stock install of contemporary Windows feels like. I think Microsoft is doing so many things right, but the direction Windows is taking is not one of them.
  - sliken 3y ago
    Same here. Had some family that were long time windows users, got asks a zillion times to upgrade to windows 10. They upgraded and hated it. Asked for help getting linux going. I installed ubuntu LTS, dragged all the icons except file browser, web browser and settings into the trash. Then got their brother laser printer working. They have been very happy since.
- partiallypro 3y ago
  Actually, Windows keeps getting better. WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. The Windows 11 interface makes Windows 10 look so dated. In some ways the interface is shaping up to look better then MacOS (still very inconsistent.) The main problems are they are yanking some legacy things that power users have loved. People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains.
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    > People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains. This is nowhere near the truth. Only ads present in a default MacOS install are in the App Store, for apps. Windows has all sorts of ads in the start menu itself.
  - pxc 3y ago
    > WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. WSL is a buggy mess with a lot of serious problems. It's nice enough for Linux dabblers but anyone else will eventually run into some combination of the memory leaks, data loss, fundamental incapabilities (e.g., no hardware passthrough), inconsistent install process, showstopping window management bugs for the graphical components, random breakage in the CLI interop interface, text encoding problems in the WSL CLI, hangups related to systemd support, lack of a proper service management layer OOTB, etc.
    - partiallypro 3y ago
      Not sure what you mean, WSL is a simple click and run from the app store now. This isn't WSL1, which did have a confusing process. WSL has changed countless workflows, it's an important addition to Windows. I understand HN is full of Apple fanboys and Microsoft haters (reminds me of the old Slashdot days sometimes), but many need to step outside and realize that Windows has made great strides since Windows 8. People that say it has gotten worse, are just simply incorrect. I don't agree with a lot of Microsoft's decisions with Windows, mostly around the widgets, but I never use them, and I would bet most people don't. Acting like the entire OS is now adware is just complete nonsense.
- themerone 3y ago
  The Windows UI gets worse in that gets more dumbed down and Mac like, but I find it keeps getting more stable. I switched from from Macs to Microsoft Surfaces when they first came out and found them to be significantly more stable. I can't deny that new Macbooks might be the best hardware you can get, but I'm still going with a Framework running Linux for my next portable.
  - jwells89 3y ago
    The frustrating part about Windows getting more mac-like is that the skin deep parts seem to be all that gets copied, and those are copied piecemeal instead of as cohesive wholes. If they’re gonna copy I wish it’d be things like all the little power user features that macs have had since OS X reached maturity.
  - pxc 3y ago
    While lots of things in macOS are missing or broken, I more frequently see OS components spontaneously break down on Windows. On the Windows laptop I'm getting rid of shortly, I have to routinely kill dwm.exe because over time it comes to lag so much that it can't keep up with window movement. Colleagues report daily lockups of the start menu which further result in explorer.exe crashes when the Windows key is tapped. The last time I used macOS professionally, I also experienced what I'd consider poor stability there, so maybe I'll feel differently after more time. But so far, after several weeks, it seems obvious to me that my new work MBP is much more stable than the Windows laptop they gave me a year ago.
    - themerone 3y ago
      I daily drove a high end Chromebook with Linux containers for a couple years and in a lot of ways it prevents an even better experience than windows. The stability of the base system was unbeatable. Apps running in the Linux container were more crash prone than bare metal, but that should improve over time. I successfully ran Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, and a bunch of other tools with surprising success.
- thefz 3y ago
  I completely let go of OSX when Apple deliberately broke SMB for the.. nth time. The days of "solid unix os with a beautiful interface" were a decade ago, now it's a toy OS.
  - helf 3y ago
    [dead]
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Mac OS is alright but it has it's flaws. IMHO it's not getting better over the years I've used it. The last few releases basically featured a whole bunch of things I neither care about nor use. Anything to do with widgets, i* apps made by Apple, ios integration (I have an Android phone), etc. I couldn't care less. I use it to run a browser + misc development tools. Could I use Linux for what I do? Yes. And I have. Why do use a mac? The hardware. Fast, beautiful, pleasure to use, runs cool, great battery, great screen, amazing touchpad, and they even fixed the keyboard (took them a while). Not a lot not to like about them. I haven't used windows in ages so not going to comment on that. The only thing that appeals to me is that it now does linux better than it used to. But the one thing it had going for it back in the day (games) is now something that Linux does as well via Steam. Which, is why I have a cheap laptop running Manjaro and Steam for some casual gaming. Works great. But the hardware is not great. Microsoft (aside from its niche Surface lineup) is mostly dependent on OEMs for laptops. Apple builds its own hardware and they do a very good job. Other laptops exist but they tend to be compromises on battery, screen quality, performance, touchpads, etc. Most vendors get at least a few of those wrong. Almost all of them ship with mediocre synaptics touchpads. Quite a few insist on bundling screens with unimpressive resolutions, contrast, etc. The cheap Manjaro laptop I have is guilty of pretty much all of that. Mediocrity is the norm for windows laptops. And invariably the nicer ones are close in price to what Apple charges. There are a few premium laptops of course. But even those tend to be compromises. E.g. Lenovo, which some people seem to like and recommend, comes with this weird nipple thing and a cheapo synaptics touchpad with actual physical buttons. Just horrible. Which is probably why most Lenovo users I've seen seem to use a wireless mouse. Neither the nipple thing nor the touchpad is really usable as an input device, apparently. The screens on those things are also not quite what I'm used to (less color, contrast and pixels, wrong aspect ratio). So, if I'm going to spend lots of money, that's not what I'd buy. I might put Asahi Linux on a mac at some point though. I don't think I'd miss OS X that much.
theshrike79 3y ago
Software is moving to the web or are essentially executables running a web browser (Electron) which is taking the hardware out of the equation - so people just want the lightest device with the biggest battery life. M-series Macs are in a category of their own in this regard. The battery lasts so long that people forget to bring their chargers along. And unless you're doing some _really_ heavy stuff, they're perfectly fine for software development too. I have personally run Unity + Rider + Dockerised backend & local database on an M-series for years with zero performance issues.
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  Yeah… I was shocked when I realized my M1 Pro was twice as fast as my desktop from a few years ago. Minus the gpu
kspyy 3y ago
windows feels more and more like adware these days, kind of hard to beat the performance you get w/ a mac, not to mention a consistent ux
- LegitShady 3y ago
  I recently installed windows 11 and explorerpatcher on a desktop and it doesn't feel like adware at all. Aside from yet another revamp of the settings menus it feels more or less like windows. The gripes about the start bar and start menu are valid but fixable. Only thing is closing down some widgits the first time that I never saw again and uninstalling a few applications.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    Counter data point: I maintain a windows 11 PC for gaming, and there are ads everywhere. Most of the ads point back to Microsoft products, but not all. Launcher ads. Live desktop ads. News ads. Weather ads. Settings page ads. Game bar ads. Lock screen ads. I turn them off as I run across them, but I can never seem to catch them all.
    - orangepurple 3y ago
      Remove 11 and install Windows 10 LTSC IOT edition until the equivalent for 11 drops. Make Windows shut up for good with Tinywall (https://tinywall.pados.hu/ https://tinywall.pados.hu/) and whitelist applications as needed.
    - maxbaines 3y ago
      Same for me.
    - LegitShady 3y ago
      I don't see any of that, on a plain old windows 11 home license. Not sure why the experience is so different. If you have the ability to install explorerpatcher I'd recommend it.
deleted 3y ago
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s1gnp0st 3y ago
The memory bandwidth of their new chips is a big deal for AI work.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Don't believe this is the reason, because it's actually too slow to train anything I thought. Compared to NVLink'd 3090s in a tower or A100s in a data center
  - ryneandal 3y ago
    Yeah. They're fine for messing around/learning with keras/sklearn, but anything heavier than some light inference is going to be offloaded to a device with a discrete GPU.
    - sliken 3y ago
      Dunno, what do you consider "light inference". M2 Max gets 5 tokens/sec on a 65B model, do you consider that "light'? 96GB max ram is quite a bit for vram and is still quite battery friendly, unlike a 3090/4090 (or 3).
      - ryneandal 3y ago
        "Light inference" insofar as inference that can actually run on consumer hardware. MPS support is lacking in many ways, i.e. BF16 support is only arriving with Sonoma. One of the biggest things Nvidia has going for it is software maturity, CUDA is far beyond any alternative, particularly MPS. Many PyTorch optimizations only support Nvidia GPUs. And the tensor core equivalents on Apple SoCs are in the ANE, which necessitates using CoreML. While unified memory bandwidth is impressive on Apple SoCs, it is still slower than recent gen Nvidia cards. While the PPW certainly is impressive and the overall ML performance is impressive for laptop SoCs, Apple Silicon simply does not hold a candle to discrete GPU performance. You're correct, it can certainly run local inference on the memory-hungry, demanding LLMs that are en vogue currently, but you won't see the performance of a discrete GPU. The unified memory lends itself to a cheaper, yet slower, alternative to DC-grade Nvidia cards with massive amounts of HBM, but there's a reason you don't see racks of Apple Silicon for LLM training, or even inference at scale. I'm hopeful the software will vastly improve as Apple Silicon adoption grows, because I'd love to run some of the stuff I build for school on my MacBook, but for now I offload it to my desktop PC because the raw compute brings more value to me than the efficiency when due dates approach.
omeysalvi 3y ago
I hope Microsoft quickly finds a solution to move to RISC. I don't care about compatibility with older software. I want the battery life without having to move to MacOS and using it's awful window management.
- esskay 3y ago
  I highly doubt they ever will. Their insistance on baking in legacy support to modern Windows is their biggest downfall. Because of that every installation of Windows will always need to be backwards compatible and carry that burden.
  - dannersy 3y ago
    Which is odd because I feel like they run a VM for older compatibilities anyway?
  - BirAdam 3y ago
    I think this could be handled more elegantly, as Apple has been able to make x86 compatibility better and more performant than quite a bit of actual x86 silicon… for MS, the backward compat of their software stack is rather important for enterprise customers. Honestly tho, I find modern Windows infuriating to use without stripping it down quite a bit. Tiny11 is a lifesaver.
    - sgjohnson 3y ago
      > I think this could be handled more elegantly, as Apple has been able to make x86 compatibility better and more performant than quite a bit of actual x86 silicon. I wouldn’t count on this being the case going forward. Let’s not forget that some 4 years ago Apple decided to completely drop support for 32-bit apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 5-8 years time they decide to drop support for anything x86. Apple hates supporting legacy crap. The exact moment when the vast majority of the recently updated Mac apps will have ARM builds, Apple will just set a release some years in the future that will kill native x86 support and that will be the end of it.
glimshe 3y ago
Macs have excellent hardware, but obsolete software equivalent to what Windows and Linux had years ago. I wonder about how well Linux runs on the latest Mac hardware...
- Banditoz 3y ago
  It's becoming a thing: https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/
- moolcool 3y ago
  What is obsolete about Mac software? It seems like much of Windows' evolution since 7 is just ads and janky telemetry features which nobody wants.
  - nortonham 3y ago
    every windows after 7 is awful. ads and random ui changes.
  - felipetrz 3y ago
    MacOS is still stuck in the 90s skeuomorphic design bs, and prevents users from changing any aspect of the UI to achieve a minimum of comfort and productivity. The UI is buggy, pop-up windows steal focus all the time, window management is pretty much nonexistent, there are slow animations with laggy focus changes. It may be fine for a soft user who just uses a browser, but trying to do any serious work on a mac is a nightmare compared to a modern tiling WM on linux.
    - flohofwoe 3y ago
      For any "serious work" you'd spend 90% of the time in a terminal anyway, so that's not much of an issue tbh (ok, admittedly that's a very coder-centric perspective).
      - bdcravens 3y ago
        Those talking about "serious" work are usually gatekeepers. Perhaps the revenue my code generates isn't "serious", but I'm happy to sit down at any Mac with Visual Studio Code and drag and drop my way to the bank instead of spending hours getting my dotfiles to artisanal perfection.
hamandcheese 3y ago
At least in the two PCs I've recently researched, the Framework 13 and the X1 Carbon, I was surprised to learn that they both have a smaller battery (61Wh, 57Wh, respectively) than the 14 inch MacBook Pro (70Wh). Is there anyone even trying to build a real competitor in that size class?
- deleted 3y ago
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- potatolicious 3y ago
  I think part of the problem is that even a 1:1 match for battery capacity won't yield anywhere near the same battery life, so why bother? As a manufacturer you'd add significant weight and cost and still not be competitive with a MacBook's battery life. Windows' laptop problems start with hardware, and a lost decade of mobile x86 chips failing to optimize for power efficiency, and a commensurate lack of investment in ARM alternatives after getting burned on Windows RT.
  - sliken 3y ago
    Agreed, if you can't match on battery life (which is hard) you have to sell it cheaper. Cheaper = smaller battery.
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    The X1 carbon is a full pound lighter than the MacBook Pro 14, and has decent battery life. It could have a significantly larger battery and still be lighter than the MacBook.
pessimizer 3y ago
[flagged]
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  My mac is not part of my identity and no one ever asks its age. This is nonsense.
bshipp 3y ago
It amazes me that reading PC vs Mac vs Linux arguments sound the exact same today as they did 20 years ago. PC is too bloated and intrusive, Mac is too expensive with limited software options, Linux is user-unfriendly but great for servers. Reading this thread feels like reading an IRC or Usenet argument from the late 90s.
- kypro 3y ago
  Who is saying Linux isn't user friendly? It's far better than Windows these days.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Something like Ubuntu these days feels to me like Windows 7, which in my opinion was peak Windows. You can sit down, find your files, install software relatively easily, and the settings are pretty intuitive. Obviously there are edge cases, but generally speaking, any random machine I've put Ubuntu on just works.
    - bshipp 3y ago
      I usually don't have an issue installing Linux on a computer. The issue generally pops up when the recipient wants a piece of software that is only available on windows (which is also true for people migration to Macs). It's one thing to learn a new OS, but having to learn new software generally becomes the sticking point.
- Clamchop 3y ago
  All true but it does seem the emotion of it has softened a lot since then. In general, people seem more open to choosing the best tool for the job and keeping a mix of devices if need be. It helps that interoperability and common software (or at least competent alternatives) is dramatically better than it used to be, that you can comfortably and inexpensively run Windows or Linux in a VM almost anywhere, and the web got big. There was once a lot of friction to so much as moving a file. Gaming beyond Windows and native big name productivity software for Linux remain pain points. Macs (let's ignore the Mac Pro) are relatively far less expensive than they used to be. The price difference was eye-watering for a lot of years. Still premium but about on the level of premium PCs.
zorrolovsky 3y ago
I know I'm in the minority, but I dislike the fact that they count me as a Windows user just because I bought a Dell laptop. First thing I did was to install Linux and ditch all the crapware that came with my machine.
bdcravens 3y ago
In addition to reasons others have mentioned (lack of adware/bloatware, speed of Apple silicon) I think more and more users are realizing just how good the integration is in the Apple ecosystem (Airpods, universal copy and paste, Messages on desktop, etc). I'm one of the few who would consider moving to a Linux machine (talking about the general population, not HN), but I'd say the integrations are just such a nice part of my daily workflow.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Yeah this took me from a long time Linux user to Apple fanboy. It’s like a Linux that just works and has a pretty UI out of the box. I can sync with my phone and desktop without any work on my end.
deleted 3y ago
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kypro 3y ago
In the Windows 7 era I was almost completely OS agnostic. I may have even slightly preferred Windows because Mac OS support wasn't great back then. Today I don't think I'll ever use a Windows machine again with the exception of being forced to duel boot for gaming. Linux is basically my go for most things these days, but I have a Macbook too because there really isn't anything that competes with their build quality (in my opinion anyway). I don't understand why Windows can't just make a decent professional OS with an old-style start menu and no ads / spyware. If they want to release a ad-riddled piece of crap for home users on a budget then whatever, but I'm obviously not going to be using that as a professional / power user. I was hoping Windows 8 & 10 might have just been products of Balmer's Microsoft, but they don't really have an excuse for it anymore. If anything it seems to just be getting progressively worse.
- thefz 3y ago
  OSX collects telemetry too.

59 points by retskrad 3y ago

moolcool 3y ago

Today's macs are better than ever, and Windows keeps getting worse.

josefresco 3y ago
That might be the case, but not the cause of this small bump: "Apple’s growth in Mac shipments is said to in large part reflect constrained supply last year."
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  They cut m2 production in half because of low demand. So, they’re comparing themselves to a bad year
nXqd 3y ago
it's true. The year MAC has the best new reliable, and fast chip, PC has AMD with broken, burnt CPU / motherboard, Intel has a chip so hot to cool down.
- yourusername 3y ago
  Even outside hardware, a fresh windows 11 install before you decrappify it is such a bad experience. Clickbait integrated into the OS, sponsored apps pre-installed like it is a $100 android phone, constant attempts to upsell you to their cloud services.
- tayo42 3y ago
  What about the keyboard? I actually forgot how bad it was until I used one yesterday on one of the MacBooks
  - selykg 3y ago
    The new keyboards are better than the older butterfly keyboards and absolutely more reliable.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    The new Mac keyboards are fine really, they rolled back from the problematic butterfly keyboards to the older magic keyboards (whatever that's actually called, but it feels a lot better and is a lot more robust) - thankfully I skipped the 'butterfly era' completely when I switched from a mid-2014 13" MBP to a 14" M1 MBP.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    Apple had a dark period between 2016 and 2019 when the keyboards on MacBooks were complete and utter garbage, but in 2019 they admitted their mistake and dropped the butterfly keyboard. Both my work-issued 2019 16” and my personal 2023 16” have excellent keyboards.
    - tayo42 3y ago
      wow was it really in 2019 they switched back, amazing how long that stuck with me lol
      - sgjohnson 3y ago
        Well, it was long 3 and a half years. Long 3 and a half years that I didn’t even feel at all because I’ve never even touched a butterfly keyboard MacBook. My previous personal MacBook was a mid-2015 15”.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    No worse than most other laptops, now. A little better than many of them. Not as good as back when Macbook Pros were still thick enough to hold a disc drive and the keys had a lot more travel, but nothing like the dark days of the very-loud, shitty-feeling, unreliable Macbook keyboards of a few years ago. Totally OK. (FWIW I use a mechanical keyboard with mine when at my desk, but I don't, like, hate life when I'm away from my desk and have to use the built-in keyboard, even if it's for a whole week. It's fine. I don't even really think about it.)
- sliken 3y ago
  AMD had an issue, but really it was short term and has been fixed, seemed to only impact a few dozen CPUs and motherboard and only when overclocking a home built machine. Yes it made quite a bit of news and drama, but it's all fixed. With all that said Apple does have a premium product that generally "just works", is more power efficient, and has (on average) a longer life cycle than a PC.
sschueller 3y ago
It highly depends what you use it for. I much prefer linux on my desktop that anything else.
- blensor 3y ago
  I know we are the minority (maybe not necessarily on HN) but if I could upvote it multiple times I would.
- nortonham 3y ago
  yeah for me linux>>mac>>bsd>>chromebook>>windows I picked up a macbook air m1 refurbished from apple to see what the fuss is about. It's a great machine. If not for that Debian would be primary OS, as it has been for the past ~15 years. I have one mac and a bunch of thinkpads running linux and/or BSD.
  - aaomidi 3y ago
    The second asahi is in a “finished” state im running Linux on my Mac.
    - paulmd 3y ago
      ideally, Asahi would never be finished any more than Debian is. And there will always be more generations of hardware. As long as Martin and others are willing to keep running the project there’s work to be done. It’s just a question of whether it’s good enough for you or not. And honestly, for laptops, the answer so far is probably still "not". Thunderbolt not working is kind of a deal killer, for example. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support Gotta say the other day I was thinking about the Mac Pro and even at only 192GB of memory, 20P/4E with some Optane SSDs and some flash behind it would absolutely tear through postgres workloads, I bet. Everyone is dumping on Mac Pro for regressing on memory capacity (after spending the last 2 years dumping on the "$50k mac" and comparing it against Threadripper builds that top out at 256GB), and asking why Mac Pro instead of Studio. Since Asahi doesn't support Thunderbolt yet, you can't use enclosures on Studio. Mac Pro is the only option for a PCIe card that Apple won't sign a driver kext for (NVIDIA cards, for example - and they do have an aarch64 driver thanks to the Tegra family!). NVIDIA glomming onto Asahi and giving it formal support instead of going their own way with L4T/Jetson Linux would be an interesting course of events. It is, after all, just ARM64/AArch64 under the hood.
jetrink 3y ago
Anecdotally, even the non-technical people in my life are starting to notice the decline of Windows after updating to Windows 11. My aunt, for example, has been a Windows user since her first computer in the 1990s and she recently told me that while she dreads learning a new operating system, she's planning to get a MacBook when it's time for a new laptop. I'm also a lifelong Windows user, but I told her that it was a good decision. I don't see a future for Windows.
- moolcool 3y ago
  Remember the ultra-cheap Windows XP machines that came loaded with weird bloatware? That's what a stock install of contemporary Windows feels like. I think Microsoft is doing so many things right, but the direction Windows is taking is not one of them.
- sliken 3y ago
  Same here. Had some family that were long time windows users, got asks a zillion times to upgrade to windows 10. They upgraded and hated it. Asked for help getting linux going. I installed ubuntu LTS, dragged all the icons except file browser, web browser and settings into the trash. Then got their brother laser printer working. They have been very happy since.
partiallypro 3y ago
Actually, Windows keeps getting better. WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. The Windows 11 interface makes Windows 10 look so dated. In some ways the interface is shaping up to look better then MacOS (still very inconsistent.) The main problems are they are yanking some legacy things that power users have loved. People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains.
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains. This is nowhere near the truth. Only ads present in a default MacOS install are in the App Store, for apps. Windows has all sorts of ads in the start menu itself.
- pxc 3y ago
  > WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. WSL is a buggy mess with a lot of serious problems. It's nice enough for Linux dabblers but anyone else will eventually run into some combination of the memory leaks, data loss, fundamental incapabilities (e.g., no hardware passthrough), inconsistent install process, showstopping window management bugs for the graphical components, random breakage in the CLI interop interface, text encoding problems in the WSL CLI, hangups related to systemd support, lack of a proper service management layer OOTB, etc.
  - partiallypro 3y ago
    Not sure what you mean, WSL is a simple click and run from the app store now. This isn't WSL1, which did have a confusing process. WSL has changed countless workflows, it's an important addition to Windows. I understand HN is full of Apple fanboys and Microsoft haters (reminds me of the old Slashdot days sometimes), but many need to step outside and realize that Windows has made great strides since Windows 8. People that say it has gotten worse, are just simply incorrect. I don't agree with a lot of Microsoft's decisions with Windows, mostly around the widgets, but I never use them, and I would bet most people don't. Acting like the entire OS is now adware is just complete nonsense.
themerone 3y ago
The Windows UI gets worse in that gets more dumbed down and Mac like, but I find it keeps getting more stable. I switched from from Macs to Microsoft Surfaces when they first came out and found them to be significantly more stable. I can't deny that new Macbooks might be the best hardware you can get, but I'm still going with a Framework running Linux for my next portable.
- jwells89 3y ago
  The frustrating part about Windows getting more mac-like is that the skin deep parts seem to be all that gets copied, and those are copied piecemeal instead of as cohesive wholes. If they’re gonna copy I wish it’d be things like all the little power user features that macs have had since OS X reached maturity.
- pxc 3y ago
  While lots of things in macOS are missing or broken, I more frequently see OS components spontaneously break down on Windows. On the Windows laptop I'm getting rid of shortly, I have to routinely kill dwm.exe because over time it comes to lag so much that it can't keep up with window movement. Colleagues report daily lockups of the start menu which further result in explorer.exe crashes when the Windows key is tapped. The last time I used macOS professionally, I also experienced what I'd consider poor stability there, so maybe I'll feel differently after more time. But so far, after several weeks, it seems obvious to me that my new work MBP is much more stable than the Windows laptop they gave me a year ago.
  - themerone 3y ago
    I daily drove a high end Chromebook with Linux containers for a couple years and in a lot of ways it prevents an even better experience than windows. The stability of the base system was unbeatable. Apps running in the Linux container were more crash prone than bare metal, but that should improve over time. I successfully ran Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, and a bunch of other tools with surprising success.
thefz 3y ago
I completely let go of OSX when Apple deliberately broke SMB for the.. nth time. The days of "solid unix os with a beautiful interface" were a decade ago, now it's a toy OS.
- helf 3y ago
  [dead]
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Mac OS is alright but it has it's flaws. IMHO it's not getting better over the years I've used it. The last few releases basically featured a whole bunch of things I neither care about nor use. Anything to do with widgets, i* apps made by Apple, ios integration (I have an Android phone), etc. I couldn't care less. I use it to run a browser + misc development tools. Could I use Linux for what I do? Yes. And I have. Why do use a mac? The hardware. Fast, beautiful, pleasure to use, runs cool, great battery, great screen, amazing touchpad, and they even fixed the keyboard (took them a while). Not a lot not to like about them. I haven't used windows in ages so not going to comment on that. The only thing that appeals to me is that it now does linux better than it used to. But the one thing it had going for it back in the day (games) is now something that Linux does as well via Steam. Which, is why I have a cheap laptop running Manjaro and Steam for some casual gaming. Works great. But the hardware is not great. Microsoft (aside from its niche Surface lineup) is mostly dependent on OEMs for laptops. Apple builds its own hardware and they do a very good job. Other laptops exist but they tend to be compromises on battery, screen quality, performance, touchpads, etc. Most vendors get at least a few of those wrong. Almost all of them ship with mediocre synaptics touchpads. Quite a few insist on bundling screens with unimpressive resolutions, contrast, etc. The cheap Manjaro laptop I have is guilty of pretty much all of that. Mediocrity is the norm for windows laptops. And invariably the nicer ones are close in price to what Apple charges. There are a few premium laptops of course. But even those tend to be compromises. E.g. Lenovo, which some people seem to like and recommend, comes with this weird nipple thing and a cheapo synaptics touchpad with actual physical buttons. Just horrible. Which is probably why most Lenovo users I've seen seem to use a wireless mouse. Neither the nipple thing nor the touchpad is really usable as an input device, apparently. The screens on those things are also not quite what I'm used to (less color, contrast and pixels, wrong aspect ratio). So, if I'm going to spend lots of money, that's not what I'd buy. I might put Asahi Linux on a mac at some point though. I don't think I'd miss OS X that much.

theshrike79 3y ago

Software is moving to the web or are essentially executables running a web browser (Electron) which is taking the hardware out of the equation - so people just want the lightest device with the biggest battery life. M-series Macs are in a category of their own in this regard. The battery lasts so long that people forget to bring their chargers along. And unless you're doing some _really_ heavy stuff, they're perfectly fine for software development too. I have personally run Unity + Rider + Dockerised backend & local database on an M-series for years with zero performance issues.

barbariangrunge 3y ago
Yeah… I was shocked when I realized my M1 Pro was twice as fast as my desktop from a few years ago. Minus the gpu

kspyy 3y ago

windows feels more and more like adware these days, kind of hard to beat the performance you get w/ a mac, not to mention a consistent ux

LegitShady 3y ago
I recently installed windows 11 and explorerpatcher on a desktop and it doesn't feel like adware at all. Aside from yet another revamp of the settings menus it feels more or less like windows. The gripes about the start bar and start menu are valid but fixable. Only thing is closing down some widgits the first time that I never saw again and uninstalling a few applications.
- falcolas 3y ago
  Counter data point: I maintain a windows 11 PC for gaming, and there are ads everywhere. Most of the ads point back to Microsoft products, but not all. Launcher ads. Live desktop ads. News ads. Weather ads. Settings page ads. Game bar ads. Lock screen ads. I turn them off as I run across them, but I can never seem to catch them all.
  - orangepurple 3y ago
    Remove 11 and install Windows 10 LTSC IOT edition until the equivalent for 11 drops. Make Windows shut up for good with Tinywall (https://tinywall.pados.hu/ https://tinywall.pados.hu/) and whitelist applications as needed.
  - maxbaines 3y ago
    Same for me.
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    I don't see any of that, on a plain old windows 11 home license. Not sure why the experience is so different. If you have the ability to install explorerpatcher I'd recommend it.

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s1gnp0st 3y ago

The memory bandwidth of their new chips is a big deal for AI work.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
Don't believe this is the reason, because it's actually too slow to train anything I thought. Compared to NVLink'd 3090s in a tower or A100s in a data center
- ryneandal 3y ago
  Yeah. They're fine for messing around/learning with keras/sklearn, but anything heavier than some light inference is going to be offloaded to a device with a discrete GPU.
  - sliken 3y ago
    Dunno, what do you consider "light inference". M2 Max gets 5 tokens/sec on a 65B model, do you consider that "light'? 96GB max ram is quite a bit for vram and is still quite battery friendly, unlike a 3090/4090 (or 3).
    - ryneandal 3y ago
      "Light inference" insofar as inference that can actually run on consumer hardware. MPS support is lacking in many ways, i.e. BF16 support is only arriving with Sonoma. One of the biggest things Nvidia has going for it is software maturity, CUDA is far beyond any alternative, particularly MPS. Many PyTorch optimizations only support Nvidia GPUs. And the tensor core equivalents on Apple SoCs are in the ANE, which necessitates using CoreML. While unified memory bandwidth is impressive on Apple SoCs, it is still slower than recent gen Nvidia cards. While the PPW certainly is impressive and the overall ML performance is impressive for laptop SoCs, Apple Silicon simply does not hold a candle to discrete GPU performance. You're correct, it can certainly run local inference on the memory-hungry, demanding LLMs that are en vogue currently, but you won't see the performance of a discrete GPU. The unified memory lends itself to a cheaper, yet slower, alternative to DC-grade Nvidia cards with massive amounts of HBM, but there's a reason you don't see racks of Apple Silicon for LLM training, or even inference at scale. I'm hopeful the software will vastly improve as Apple Silicon adoption grows, because I'd love to run some of the stuff I build for school on my MacBook, but for now I offload it to my desktop PC because the raw compute brings more value to me than the efficiency when due dates approach.

omeysalvi 3y ago

I hope Microsoft quickly finds a solution to move to RISC. I don't care about compatibility with older software. I want the battery life without having to move to MacOS and using it's awful window management.

esskay 3y ago
I highly doubt they ever will. Their insistance on baking in legacy support to modern Windows is their biggest downfall. Because of that every installation of Windows will always need to be backwards compatible and carry that burden.
- dannersy 3y ago
  Which is odd because I feel like they run a VM for older compatibilities anyway?
- BirAdam 3y ago
  I think this could be handled more elegantly, as Apple has been able to make x86 compatibility better and more performant than quite a bit of actual x86 silicon… for MS, the backward compat of their software stack is rather important for enterprise customers. Honestly tho, I find modern Windows infuriating to use without stripping it down quite a bit. Tiny11 is a lifesaver.
  - sgjohnson 3y ago
    > I think this could be handled more elegantly, as Apple has been able to make x86 compatibility better and more performant than quite a bit of actual x86 silicon. I wouldn’t count on this being the case going forward. Let’s not forget that some 4 years ago Apple decided to completely drop support for 32-bit apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 5-8 years time they decide to drop support for anything x86. Apple hates supporting legacy crap. The exact moment when the vast majority of the recently updated Mac apps will have ARM builds, Apple will just set a release some years in the future that will kill native x86 support and that will be the end of it.

glimshe 3y ago

Macs have excellent hardware, but obsolete software equivalent to what Windows and Linux had years ago. I wonder about how well Linux runs on the latest Mac hardware...

Banditoz 3y ago
It's becoming a thing: https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/
moolcool 3y ago
What is obsolete about Mac software? It seems like much of Windows' evolution since 7 is just ads and janky telemetry features which nobody wants.
- nortonham 3y ago
  every windows after 7 is awful. ads and random ui changes.
- felipetrz 3y ago
  MacOS is still stuck in the 90s skeuomorphic design bs, and prevents users from changing any aspect of the UI to achieve a minimum of comfort and productivity. The UI is buggy, pop-up windows steal focus all the time, window management is pretty much nonexistent, there are slow animations with laggy focus changes. It may be fine for a soft user who just uses a browser, but trying to do any serious work on a mac is a nightmare compared to a modern tiling WM on linux.
  - flohofwoe 3y ago
    For any "serious work" you'd spend 90% of the time in a terminal anyway, so that's not much of an issue tbh (ok, admittedly that's a very coder-centric perspective).
    - bdcravens 3y ago
      Those talking about "serious" work are usually gatekeepers. Perhaps the revenue my code generates isn't "serious", but I'm happy to sit down at any Mac with Visual Studio Code and drag and drop my way to the bank instead of spending hours getting my dotfiles to artisanal perfection.

hamandcheese 3y ago

At least in the two PCs I've recently researched, the Framework 13 and the X1 Carbon, I was surprised to learn that they both have a smaller battery (61Wh, 57Wh, respectively) than the 14 inch MacBook Pro (70Wh). Is there anyone even trying to build a real competitor in that size class?

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potatolicious 3y ago
I think part of the problem is that even a 1:1 match for battery capacity won't yield anywhere near the same battery life, so why bother? As a manufacturer you'd add significant weight and cost and still not be competitive with a MacBook's battery life. Windows' laptop problems start with hardware, and a lost decade of mobile x86 chips failing to optimize for power efficiency, and a commensurate lack of investment in ARM alternatives after getting burned on Windows RT.
- sliken 3y ago
  Agreed, if you can't match on battery life (which is hard) you have to sell it cheaper. Cheaper = smaller battery.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  The X1 carbon is a full pound lighter than the MacBook Pro 14, and has decent battery life. It could have a significantly larger battery and still be lighter than the MacBook.

pessimizer 3y ago

[flagged]

nickthegreek 3y ago
My mac is not part of my identity and no one ever asks its age. This is nonsense.

bshipp 3y ago

It amazes me that reading PC vs Mac vs Linux arguments sound the exact same today as they did 20 years ago. PC is too bloated and intrusive, Mac is too expensive with limited software options, Linux is user-unfriendly but great for servers. Reading this thread feels like reading an IRC or Usenet argument from the late 90s.

kypro 3y ago
Who is saying Linux isn't user friendly? It's far better than Windows these days.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Something like Ubuntu these days feels to me like Windows 7, which in my opinion was peak Windows. You can sit down, find your files, install software relatively easily, and the settings are pretty intuitive. Obviously there are edge cases, but generally speaking, any random machine I've put Ubuntu on just works.
  - bshipp 3y ago
    I usually don't have an issue installing Linux on a computer. The issue generally pops up when the recipient wants a piece of software that is only available on windows (which is also true for people migration to Macs). It's one thing to learn a new OS, but having to learn new software generally becomes the sticking point.
Clamchop 3y ago
All true but it does seem the emotion of it has softened a lot since then. In general, people seem more open to choosing the best tool for the job and keeping a mix of devices if need be. It helps that interoperability and common software (or at least competent alternatives) is dramatically better than it used to be, that you can comfortably and inexpensively run Windows or Linux in a VM almost anywhere, and the web got big. There was once a lot of friction to so much as moving a file. Gaming beyond Windows and native big name productivity software for Linux remain pain points. Macs (let's ignore the Mac Pro) are relatively far less expensive than they used to be. The price difference was eye-watering for a lot of years. Still premium but about on the level of premium PCs.

zorrolovsky 3y ago

I know I'm in the minority, but I dislike the fact that they count me as a Windows user just because I bought a Dell laptop. First thing I did was to install Linux and ditch all the crapware that came with my machine.

bdcravens 3y ago

In addition to reasons others have mentioned (lack of adware/bloatware, speed of Apple silicon) I think more and more users are realizing just how good the integration is in the Apple ecosystem (Airpods, universal copy and paste, Messages on desktop, etc). I'm one of the few who would consider moving to a Linux machine (talking about the general population, not HN), but I'd say the integrations are just such a nice part of my daily workflow.

edgyquant 3y ago
Yeah this took me from a long time Linux user to Apple fanboy. It’s like a Linux that just works and has a pretty UI out of the box. I can sync with my phone and desktop without any work on my end.

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kypro 3y ago

In the Windows 7 era I was almost completely OS agnostic. I may have even slightly preferred Windows because Mac OS support wasn't great back then. Today I don't think I'll ever use a Windows machine again with the exception of being forced to duel boot for gaming. Linux is basically my go for most things these days, but I have a Macbook too because there really isn't anything that competes with their build quality (in my opinion anyway). I don't understand why Windows can't just make a decent professional OS with an old-style start menu and no ads / spyware. If they want to release a ad-riddled piece of crap for home users on a budget then whatever, but I'm obviously not going to be using that as a professional / power user. I was hoping Windows 8 & 10 might have just been products of Balmer's Microsoft, but they don't really have an excuse for it anymore. If anything it seems to just be getting progressively worse.

thefz 3y ago
OSX collects telemetry too.