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I pretty much see the Macbook as some fancy toys with mediocre software. Maybe the kernel is solid but other software are very meh, even comparing to Windows. B

I pretty much see the Macbook as some fancy toys with mediocre software. Maybe the kernel is solid but other software are very meh, even comparing to Windows. But I'm definitely biased as a Windows/Linux user, and my hobby is system programming so naturally a Linux box is more suitable. Biggest grief with MacOS software: - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows - Scrollbar and other UI issues Unfortunately I don't think Asahi is going to catch up, and Macbook is so expensive, so I'll probably keep buying second hand Dell/Lenovo laptop and dump a Linux on top of it.

lou1306 1y ago
What makes Mac great is/was the ecosystem of 3rd party tools with great UI and features. Apple used to be good enough at writing basic 1st-party apps that would mostly just disappear into the background and let you do your thing, but they are getting increasingly "louder" which... may become a problem. I still agree that second hand Thinkpads are ridiculously better in terms of price/quality ratio, and also more environmentally sustainable.
- markus_zhang 1y ago
  I have to admit, every time I looked into screenshots of earlier Macs, like the 68K and PPC ones, I felt I loved the UI and such. I even bought a PPC laptop (I think it's a maxed out iBook with 1.5GB of RAM) to tinker with PPC assembly. But I could be wrong. Maybe the earlier Macs didn't have great software either -- but at least the UI is better.
  - prewett 1y ago
    Having lived through those days... well, it was good for the time, mostly. MacOS was definitely better than Windows 3.11, and a lot more whimsical, both the OS and Mac software in general, which I miss. The featureset, though, was limited. Managing extensions was clunky, and until MacOS 10, applications had a fixed amount of RAM they could use, which could be set by the user, but which was allocated at program start. It was also shared memory, like Windows 3.11 and to some extent Windows 95/98, so one program could, and routinely did, take down the whole OS. With Windows NT (not much adopted by consumers, to be fair), this did not happen. Windows NT and 2000 were definitely better than MacOS, arguably even UI-wise. I do miss window shading from MacOS 8 or 9, though. I think a whimsical skin for MacOS would be nice, too. The system error bomb icon was classic, the sad-Mac boot-failure icon was at least consolation. Now everything is cold and professional, but at least it stays out of my way and looks decent.
    - markus_zhang 1y ago
      Interesting. I thought the new MacOS was unix-y? But I never owned a Mac back then so not sure. For me Windows 2000 is the pinnacle. It doesn't crash (often), supports most of the games I played then, and I like the UI design.
      - IIsi50MHz 1y ago
        OS X and later are derived from NeXT Step, which makes it derived from BSD. And thus, UNIX-y. Macintosh system software versions less than 10 are Apple original development. The earliest versions were designed for hardware with only 512 or 128 kilobytes of RAM and without physical support for protected memory. Unfortunately, backwards-compatibility requirements prevented the addition of process memory isolation before OS X. One result of not having this protection was that an application with a memory bug could overwrite memory location zero(the beginning of a critical OS-only area), or any other memory area, and then all bets were off. Some third-party utilities, such as Optimem RAMCharger, gave partial protection from this by using the processor's protected mode, and also removed the occasional need for users to manually set the amount of memory allocated to a program. However, many programs were not compatible with these utilities.
Sohcahtoa82 1y ago
> - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows It really is awful. Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Where's the "cut" option for moving a file? Why is there no option for showing ALL folders (ie, /bin, /etc) without having to memorize some esoteric key combination? For fuck's sake, even my home directory is hidden by default. > - Scrollbar and other UI issues Disappearing scrollbars make sense on mobile where screen real estate is at a premium and people don't typically interact with them. It does not make sense on any screen that you'd use a mouse to navigate. For years, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration without either an esoteric command line or using 3rd party software. Even now, you can't disable scroll wheel acceleration. I hate that I can't just make a consistent "one click = ~2 lines of text" behavior. I could go on and on about the just outright dumb decisions regarding UX in MacOS. So many things just don't make sense, and I feel like they were done for the sole purpose of being different from everyone else, rather than because of a sense of being better.
- kemayo 1y ago
  > Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Command + backspace.
- cmiller1 1y ago
  > Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Cmd+delete? I don't really want it to be a single key as it's too easy to accidentally trigger (say I try to delete some text in a filename but accidentally bump my mouse and lose focus on the name)
- dd_xplore 1y ago
  You know IMHO Apple doesn't have any 'Pro' machines. A 'Pro' machine isn't about hardware (although it helps), it comes mainly from the software. MacOS doesn't have enough 'openness' to it. There's no debug information, lack of tools etc. To this day I can still daily drive a XP or 98/2000 machine( if they supported the modern web) because all the essentials are still intact. You can look around system files, you customize them edit them. I could modify game files to change their behaviour. I could modify windows registry in tons of ways to customize my experience, experiment lot of things. As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely. All the random hardware that we see launching from time to time have drivers for windows but not for Mac. Even linux has tons of terminal tools and customisation. MacOS is like a glorified phone OS. It's weirdly locked down at certain places that drive you crazy. Tons of things do not have context menus(windows is filled with it). Window management sucks, there's no device manager! Not even cli tools! (Or maybe I'm not aware?) Why can't I simpy cut and paste? There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting, windows and linux are filled to the brim with these! Even though the UI is good looking I just cannot switch to an Apple device (both Mac and iPhone) for these reasons. I bought an iPad pro and I'm regretting. There's no termux equivalent in iPadOS/iOS , there are some terminal tools but they can't use the full processing power, they can't multi thread. They can't run in background, it's just ridiculous. The iPad Pro is just a glorious iPhone. Hardware doesn't make a device 'Pro' software does. Video editing isn't a 'Pro' workflow in the sense that it can be done in any machine that has sufficient oomph. An iPad Pro from 5 years ago will be slower than an iPad Air of today, does that make the air a 'Pro' device? No!

lou1306 1y ago

What makes Mac great is/was the ecosystem of 3rd party tools with great UI and features. Apple used to be good enough at writing basic 1st-party apps that would mostly just disappear into the background and let you do your thing, but they are getting increasingly "louder" which... may become a problem. I still agree that second hand Thinkpads are ridiculously better in terms of price/quality ratio, and also more environmentally sustainable.

markus_zhang 1y ago
I have to admit, every time I looked into screenshots of earlier Macs, like the 68K and PPC ones, I felt I loved the UI and such. I even bought a PPC laptop (I think it's a maxed out iBook with 1.5GB of RAM) to tinker with PPC assembly. But I could be wrong. Maybe the earlier Macs didn't have great software either -- but at least the UI is better.
- prewett 1y ago
  Having lived through those days... well, it was good for the time, mostly. MacOS was definitely better than Windows 3.11, and a lot more whimsical, both the OS and Mac software in general, which I miss. The featureset, though, was limited. Managing extensions was clunky, and until MacOS 10, applications had a fixed amount of RAM they could use, which could be set by the user, but which was allocated at program start. It was also shared memory, like Windows 3.11 and to some extent Windows 95/98, so one program could, and routinely did, take down the whole OS. With Windows NT (not much adopted by consumers, to be fair), this did not happen. Windows NT and 2000 were definitely better than MacOS, arguably even UI-wise. I do miss window shading from MacOS 8 or 9, though. I think a whimsical skin for MacOS would be nice, too. The system error bomb icon was classic, the sad-Mac boot-failure icon was at least consolation. Now everything is cold and professional, but at least it stays out of my way and looks decent.
  - markus_zhang 1y ago
    Interesting. I thought the new MacOS was unix-y? But I never owned a Mac back then so not sure. For me Windows 2000 is the pinnacle. It doesn't crash (often), supports most of the games I played then, and I like the UI design.
    - IIsi50MHz 1y ago
      OS X and later are derived from NeXT Step, which makes it derived from BSD. And thus, UNIX-y. Macintosh system software versions less than 10 are Apple original development. The earliest versions were designed for hardware with only 512 or 128 kilobytes of RAM and without physical support for protected memory. Unfortunately, backwards-compatibility requirements prevented the addition of process memory isolation before OS X. One result of not having this protection was that an application with a memory bug could overwrite memory location zero(the beginning of a critical OS-only area), or any other memory area, and then all bets were off. Some third-party utilities, such as Optimem RAMCharger, gave partial protection from this by using the processor's protected mode, and also removed the occasional need for users to manually set the amount of memory allocated to a program. However, many programs were not compatible with these utilities.

Sohcahtoa82 1y ago

> - Finder is very mediocre comparing to even File explorer in Windows It really is awful. Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Where's the "cut" option for moving a file? Why is there no option for showing ALL folders (ie, /bin, /etc) without having to memorize some esoteric key combination? For fuck's sake, even my home directory is hidden by default. > - Scrollbar and other UI issues Disappearing scrollbars make sense on mobile where screen real estate is at a premium and people don't typically interact with them. It does not make sense on any screen that you'd use a mouse to navigate. For years, you couldn't even disable mouse acceleration without either an esoteric command line or using 3rd party software. Even now, you can't disable scroll wheel acceleration. I hate that I can't just make a consistent "one click = ~2 lines of text" behavior. I could go on and on about the just outright dumb decisions regarding UX in MacOS. So many things just don't make sense, and I feel like they were done for the sole purpose of being different from everyone else, rather than because of a sense of being better.

kemayo 1y ago
> Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Command + backspace.
cmiller1 1y ago
> Why the hell is there no key to delete a file? Cmd+delete? I don't really want it to be a single key as it's too easy to accidentally trigger (say I try to delete some text in a filename but accidentally bump my mouse and lose focus on the name)
dd_xplore 1y ago
You know IMHO Apple doesn't have any 'Pro' machines. A 'Pro' machine isn't about hardware (although it helps), it comes mainly from the software. MacOS doesn't have enough 'openness' to it. There's no debug information, lack of tools etc. To this day I can still daily drive a XP or 98/2000 machine( if they supported the modern web) because all the essentials are still intact. You can look around system files, you customize them edit them. I could modify game files to change their behaviour. I could modify windows registry in tons of ways to customize my experience, experiment lot of things. As a 'Pro' user my first expectation is options, options in everything I do , which MacOS lacks severely. All the random hardware that we see launching from time to time have drivers for windows but not for Mac. Even linux has tons of terminal tools and customisation. MacOS is like a glorified phone OS. It's weirdly locked down at certain places that drive you crazy. Tons of things do not have context menus(windows is filled with it). Window management sucks, there's no device manager! Not even cli tools! (Or maybe I'm not aware?) Why can't I simpy cut and paste? There's no API/way to control system elements via scripting, windows and linux are filled to the brim with these! Even though the UI is good looking I just cannot switch to an Apple device (both Mac and iPhone) for these reasons. I bought an iPad pro and I'm regretting. There's no termux equivalent in iPadOS/iOS , there are some terminal tools but they can't use the full processing power, they can't multi thread. They can't run in background, it's just ridiculous. The iPad Pro is just a glorious iPhone. Hardware doesn't make a device 'Pro' software does. Video editing isn't a 'Pro' workflow in the sense that it can be done in any machine that has sufficient oomph. An iPad Pro from 5 years ago will be slower than an iPad Air of today, does that make the air a 'Pro' device? No!