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People are driven away from open standards to vendors like Apple because so much open stuff just sucks so goddamn bad. So will Apple one day fuck me over? Per

People are driven away from open standards to vendors like Apple because so much open stuff just sucks so goddamn bad. So will Apple one day fuck me over? Perhaps, but in the meantime their shit just works and I am going to use it because I don’t have time to spend hours troubleshooting why manufacturer A doesn’t work with free publisher B when free driver C is loaded.

dhosek 2y ago
That was a bit part of my move to Mac from Windows back 24 years ago. It was such a pain trying to get all the bits and pieces working together and with the Mac, yes it was more expensive (although honestly, not that much more expensive) but stuff just worked out of the box and I didn’t have regular crashes. I’m sure things have improved in Wintel land since 2000–2001, but my Apple experience has been remarkably stress-free.
- kcplate 2y ago
  More expensive up front but in my experience the hardware lasts longer and is usable for longer. I just recently retired a 15 year old MBP due to a battery swell. I’d still probably have it on my desk and occasionally using it if i wasn’t concerned about it exploding and burning my house down.
pydry 2y ago
Ive watched people who swear that Apple "just works" struggle when it doesnt. The difference is just that because of the halo effect they dont blame Apple for the shit that doesnt work. If there is a 3rd party tangentially involved they blame them instead.
- rahoulb 2y ago
  The difference (in my experience) is if it works with Apple, it "just works". If it doesn't work, it will never work. It's a binary and you generally know the answer straight away. Some people dislike it because they enjoy looking for answers and the freedom to change how things work. Others like it because they don't want to spend their time searching and mucking about with configurations.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
But have you thought to ask why that is? The general mechanism for free software to be developed is for the individual users to make modifications. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who know how to. Someone sees something wrong, fixes it. Apple interferes with this. If you don't like an app on your iPhone, even if it's open source, you can't just make a minor change because for that you have to pay $100/year and buy a Mac and all of this friction that discourages people from doing it. And then upstream doesn't get the little change (times a thousand individual users with an itch to scratch), and the one-time contributor doesn't become a repeat contributor either. Not only that, you can't distribute a half-finished app to the public -- even if it's free -- because it wouldn't pass review. But then you can't get any users who might help you to finish it. So the state of open source software on the iPhone is a shambles, because Apple neutered the primary mechanism for free-as-in-speech software to become any good on their platform. Compare this to Linux on a PC where simple things are about as likely to "just work" as they are on a Mac, more likely to do so than on Windows, and weird and complicated things work better than on either of them because even though they're not always easy they're very nearly always possible. Which is the perpetual sham of "it just works". Simple things are simple everywhere because they're common and well-supported. Complicated things are often difficult, but some platforms make them prohibitively difficult or simply disallowed, and people confuse this with "easy" because you don't remember spending time to make something work when you can't. But that's not actually an advantage, because you're not obligated to spend time on something that doesn't immediately work, but the option to choose to is valuable when sometimes it's worth it.
- _as_text 2y ago
  Well that's all fun and games until you start putting off paying Internet bill for two weeks because it turns out that you misconfigured your password app and it actually didn't save your password to the utility service provider and you realize you have no internet one day and you have a school assignment ugh and maybe your credit score gets 0.5% lower and yeah it's all very much your fault. "But you can just be more careful! Handle stuff like this as it arises!" Yeah, sure, just like during Communist times you could easily get more than one pound of coffee per half a year if you're just careful and note when it's available in stores as a drop-in I believe this whole Apple vs Linux debate is perfectly analogous to the West vs East Germany debate, to the point that almost all intuitions/arguments for the latter are perfectly reusable in the former

dhosek 2y ago

That was a bit part of my move to Mac from Windows back 24 years ago. It was such a pain trying to get all the bits and pieces working together and with the Mac, yes it was more expensive (although honestly, not that much more expensive) but stuff just worked out of the box and I didn’t have regular crashes. I’m sure things have improved in Wintel land since 2000–2001, but my Apple experience has been remarkably stress-free.

kcplate 2y ago
More expensive up front but in my experience the hardware lasts longer and is usable for longer. I just recently retired a 15 year old MBP due to a battery swell. I’d still probably have it on my desk and occasionally using it if i wasn’t concerned about it exploding and burning my house down.

pydry 2y ago

Ive watched people who swear that Apple "just works" struggle when it doesnt. The difference is just that because of the halo effect they dont blame Apple for the shit that doesnt work. If there is a 3rd party tangentially involved they blame them instead.

rahoulb 2y ago
The difference (in my experience) is if it works with Apple, it "just works". If it doesn't work, it will never work. It's a binary and you generally know the answer straight away. Some people dislike it because they enjoy looking for answers and the freedom to change how things work. Others like it because they don't want to spend their time searching and mucking about with configurations.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

But have you thought to ask why that is? The general mechanism for free software to be developed is for the individual users to make modifications. Not all of them, of course, but the ones who know how to. Someone sees something wrong, fixes it. Apple interferes with this. If you don't like an app on your iPhone, even if it's open source, you can't just make a minor change because for that you have to pay $100/year and buy a Mac and all of this friction that discourages people from doing it. And then upstream doesn't get the little change (times a thousand individual users with an itch to scratch), and the one-time contributor doesn't become a repeat contributor either. Not only that, you can't distribute a half-finished app to the public -- even if it's free -- because it wouldn't pass review. But then you can't get any users who might help you to finish it. So the state of open source software on the iPhone is a shambles, because Apple neutered the primary mechanism for free-as-in-speech software to become any good on their platform. Compare this to Linux on a PC where simple things are about as likely to "just work" as they are on a Mac, more likely to do so than on Windows, and weird and complicated things work better than on either of them because even though they're not always easy they're very nearly always possible. Which is the perpetual sham of "it just works". Simple things are simple everywhere because they're common and well-supported. Complicated things are often difficult, but some platforms make them prohibitively difficult or simply disallowed, and people confuse this with "easy" because you don't remember spending time to make something work when you can't. But that's not actually an advantage, because you're not obligated to spend time on something that doesn't immediately work, but the option to choose to is valuable when sometimes it's worth it.

_as_text 2y ago
Well that's all fun and games until you start putting off paying Internet bill for two weeks because it turns out that you misconfigured your password app and it actually didn't save your password to the utility service provider and you realize you have no internet one day and you have a school assignment ugh and maybe your credit score gets 0.5% lower and yeah it's all very much your fault. "But you can just be more careful! Handle stuff like this as it arises!" Yeah, sure, just like during Communist times you could easily get more than one pound of coffee per half a year if you're just careful and note when it's available in stores as a drop-in I believe this whole Apple vs Linux debate is perfectly analogous to the West vs East Germany debate, to the point that almost all intuitions/arguments for the latter are perfectly reusable in the former