8 ms·

I ended up getting two (one for each of my daughters). The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the le

by juancn 4mo ago

I ended up getting two (one for each of my daughters). The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. It really just works. They have used Windows and Linux before (my kids and wife, that is), but something is always not quite right and needs my involvement. These days gone 100% Mac, my interventions are usually initial setup and whenever the Samsung printer jams.

sgt 4mo ago
I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.
- wil421 4mo ago
  The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.
  - commandersaki 4mo ago
    I think Apple's era of unreliable laptops were the ones with Butterfly keyboards. So many issues back then, but they did a complete 180 once they reintroduced the magic keyboard and then Apple Silicon.
    - raspasov 4mo ago
      Apple Intel laptop + a butterfly keyboard was the absolute gutter tier experience. Not only it was slow and ran hot, but after a few months a random key would get stuck and stop working.
      - frollogaston 4mo ago
        Also touch bar, also was all USB-C at a time when there was 0 adoption (2016). I went out of my way to buy a 2015 model instead, held up for 10 years.
        wil421 4mo ago
        I was gifted a Touch Bar and bought an M1 air when they came out. It was a night a day difference. Fan speed and throttling killed the experience and Touch Bar was not good.
      - sgt 4mo ago
        I agree that sucked, and I fixed a few of them myself instead of sending to Apple. Got quite good at it.
  - havaloc 4mo ago
    Now Mac is almost the same if not cheaper up front, and in the long run too. It's a wild thing to see.
- recursive 4mo ago
  I got my first ipad a year or two ago. It took me many tries over about an hour to setup the apple account I needed to log in to the device. I wish I had documented the process, because it's so different than what people typically claim about Apple ease of use.
  - Insanity 4mo ago
    Interesting experience. I set up 2 iPad pros, basically one shot experience that took a few minutes. Even the first one I owned was straightforward
- kstrauser 4mo ago
  Some older relatives asked for a computer recommendation. I told them a thousand reasons why a MacBook Air (at that moment) would be perfect for them. They went to Best Buy and came home with the Dellpaq thing that the guy there told them had better specs. Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water. [0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.
  - sgt 4mo ago
    The worst thing about those cheaper "Best Buy" Windows machines is that they're heavily laden with all kinds of software making the PC extremely slow from the start. I just don't understand who they can get away with it.
- lobf 4mo ago
  Yup. Around 2005 my 83 year old grandpa decided he wanted to learn how to use a computer. I told him to just get a Mac- it’s a little more expensive but the user experience is unparalleled, and the Genius Bar offers (do they still?) classes in using your computer if needed. Never had to help him with buggy software, crashes, etc. It just worked.
  - sgt 4mo ago
    My grandmother - at 104, was still rocking her iPad! Sending / receiving emails, doing FaceTime, reading the news.
nozzlegear 4mo ago
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.
- xp84 4mo ago
  They added a second right-click menu in Explorer now. IDK if this is Windows 11 or if 10 had this. When you right-click a file, you get a shorter menu with a larger font. But it might not have the option you want -- you have to click "Show more options" at the bottom. Then it lags for 1 second (this is a Core Ultra 9 with 64GB of RAM btw) and opens a new one, with the old font metrics, and that one also has all the things the original ones did. This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window. I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.
  - gopher_space 4mo ago
    If I'm using my old laptop with a slow CPU I get to see Win 11 draw an older GUI I recognize and then cover it with whatever they're doing now.
  - Thlom 4mo ago
    I'm on win11 at work and when I right click in explorer it loads the normal menu but then immediately populates the menu with more options. It takes just long enough before it populates more options for you to maybe click on something which has then moved to somewhere else. Extremely annoying.
  - juancn 4mo ago
tantalor 4mo ago
Choosing an OS 101 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho... It used to be, > Do you fear technology? > > Yes > Is your daddy rich? > > Yes > MacOS I guess we can remove the second question now.
- lowbloodsugar 4mo ago
  "Do you fear technology?" should be "Do you have no fucks to give for all the bullshit?" I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.
- mezeek 4mo ago
  Ah yes, the classic tech guys on Hacker News that fear technology.
  - notatoad 4mo ago
    yeah, i think a lot of people on hacker news basically agree with that old meme that says "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."
  - uticus 4mo ago
    sometimes the wizards know best when to fear magic
    - weirdmantis69 4mo ago
      fly... you fools...
  - panzagl 4mo ago
    Ah yes, the classic Mac user on Hacker News that thinks they're a tech guy. :-)
- frollogaston 4mo ago
  Yes I fear tech, idc
RZelaya 4mo ago
Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense. I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier. My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.
- porridgeraisin 4mo ago
  The price thing is really true. My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out. Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh. So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever. Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those. For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well. Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.
  - nixass 4mo ago
    > The price thing is really true. No price tag can make me use insufferable MacOS, the same as iOS.
thewebguyd 4mo ago
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users. Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.
- infecto 4mo ago
  Part of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS. Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.
  - bdamm 4mo ago
    How? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well. My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.
    - mountain_peak 4mo ago
      People might not remember, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows. Back then, the Macintosh versions were 1st-class citizens and (and you mention), Windows versions were a buggy mess. Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today. My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.
ndmsksizjs 4mo ago
[dead]
adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
I’ve faced far more issues with relatives with Macs than when they had Linux. The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all. The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system. Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.
- wl 4mo ago
  I recently had an experience with a family member's Ubuntu LTS machine where it was stuck on an old release, /etc/apt/sources.list needed to be edited because of Ubuntu's obnoxious habit of breaking old repositories, and then I needed to debug apt issues to get do-release-upgrade to actually work. The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.
  - imp0cat 4mo ago
    But how old exactly? https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle The 16.04 is still supported and it was released in 2016! So it must have been an even older system, right?
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    Eh. You just install codex or Claude code and tell it to fix it for you.
    - pdimitar 4mo ago
      Hell, you can install the gemini/antigravity CLI and use Gemini's free tiers and it will still fix it for you.
- juancn 4mo ago
  The issue is when it updates. The moment it runs an update all bets are off. It's always audio for me, it breaks in the weirdest ways. Mac updates are the best in the industry, period. Close to zero chance of having an issue (unless you're messing with third-party kernel extensions).
xmeadow 4mo ago
I know what you mean but you will regret your choices Ehen your wife and doughters forget what a wifi-network is.
drnick1 4mo ago
Apple and the NSA must know a lot about you.
- bdamm 4mo ago
  What are you saying, that you think Windows or Linux are better platforms for evading covert government oversight? Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.
  - drnick1 4mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
    - bdamm 4mo ago
      What is your point? If anything, PRISM argues that Apple users are more secure; it took the NSA a solid five years longer to work their way into Apple. But at this point, every provider is compromised, every country is compromised, so again - what is your point? The government knows a lot about everyone, it has nothing to do with choice of computing platform. It is also worth noting that the USA is not the only country collecting data on US persons (and everyone else.) The question is not, does the USA know about you, the question is really, how many governments know all about you and how does that information manifest in your life?
      - drnick1 4mo ago
        > But at this point, every provider is compromised Yes, and its probably fair to assume that Apple and/or the government can access any of your files on your devices or in the cloud. My suggestion is not to use any "provider." Use free software, and keep your data locally on encrypted drives.
        bdamm 4mo ago
antaviana 4mo ago
My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programmed obsolescence feels as a huge resource waste. It should not be allowed, if anything for environmental reasons.
- robertjpayne 4mo ago
  I'd still say getting 7 years of free OS supports for hardware is pretty incredible. All-in-ones like iMacs are always going to be wasteful on the environmental side of things faster because displays will outlive the usefulness of the rest of it by a large large margin. At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.
  - baq 4mo ago
    I have a 2019 GPU in my windows box and I’d be pissed off if it stopped working in the next few years. Computers nowadays are useful for much longer than they used to. Spectre class vulnerabilities which take 50% performance to properly (kinda) mitigate are the only reason to maybe upgrade if all you do is browse facebook and pay bills.
  - taude 4mo ago
    How is the OS Free? It's part of what you pay for. I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it. We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware. EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.
    - bombcar 4mo ago
      In the bad (good?) old days Mac OS X cost money each upgrade.
whateverboat 4mo ago
I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4. It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem. I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise. Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.
- rbanffy 4mo ago
  Apart from the GUI environment, the Mac is a Unix and I find it hard to notice much difference between it and a Linux. I use MacPorts on my Macs and there is no drama with command line tools. On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.
  - DanielHB 4mo ago
    sed has different syntax on macos because macos is based on BSD. Really annoying to get a ticket "fix this build script for macos" and it is freaking sed compatibility issues. edit: to be fair that happened once, but it was annoying
    - rbanffy 4mo ago
      MacPorts provides GNU equivalents to the native BSD ones. You can always check if there is a `gsed` binary and use it (or check the OS, but checking direct behavior is always best). But yes, macOS is a Unix, not a Linux.
greatgib 4mo ago
I easily guess that it is just that you are used to Mac, so you easily "forget" the common issues that you are usually encountering. For example, one of the most common example is icloud subtly enabled by default for syncing photo and data, and that will get your mac and iphone stuck in a complicated mess when things get full with the limited free space.
- juancn 4mo ago
  Not really, I've been using linux since the Slackware on diskette era. I know my way around recompiling a kernel (used to do it on a 486). I also did dev on Windows, I know the internals pretty well (I even did embedded on CE, writing portable code across CE/95/NT family runtimes). I still prefer Mac, it's much less likely to randomly break, mainly due to the fact that the hardware the software runs on is extremely predictable. I also like the care about muggle usability that Apple tends to pursue (granted, not perfect, but way better than the other two)
porridgeraisin 4mo ago
Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.
micromacrofoot 4mo ago
Yeah exactly, one of my kids has a Windows PC for gaming and just logging in to the thing is arduous sometimes... Microsoft's account auth system is so bad with its random redirects. Don't even me get me started on the parental controls, it's probably one of the laggiest systems I use.
- baq 4mo ago
  Let’s not pretend Apple screen time is any good. My 13yo daughter figured out multiple ways around it by herself and googled a few more and if it wasn’t leaking like a sieve it isn’t granular enough anyway (e.g. music apps offering videos - I want to block videos but not music - can’t be done)
  - micromacrofoot 4mo ago
    Yeah none of them are great, but Microsoft's is awful
jmyeet 4mo ago
As a fellow family IT specialist, about a decade ago I took the stance that if it's not Apple, I'm not fixing it. I'm not dealing with some bullshit issue with weird proprietary drivers or crapware. The straw that broke the camel's back was a Dell laptop that wasn't working with the Wifi until I turned off IPv6. It's also why I don't use Linux for a desktop unless I have to. I've had years of debugging weird issues with drivers, editing /etc files, changing X settings and so on. MacOS isn't perfect. In fact, I think Apple keeps making it worse because they have no real product vision now and it's just a bunch of teams making local changes to justify their own existence. But you can look at MacOS in one of two ways: as a better Windows (by having a UNIX-like core) or as a better Linux (by having a better UI subsystem). Either way it's a win (IMHO). I'm torn on the Macbook Neo, personally. It really is just a giant iPhone 18 with a keyboard. Plus you can get a Macbook Air at times for $900. That's $200 more than the high-end Neo. Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.
- Telaneo 4mo ago
  > Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me. For anything that's not pure consumption, that's a massive upgrade. A proper keyboard makes a world of difference. You don't need it if all you do is browse and view, and you can manage if you only need to send an email here and there, but I'd never want to program or write longer texts (emails, essays, spreadsheets for that matter) on an iPad, even if I hooked up a keyboard, unless I'm desperate and have no other options.
- tim333 4mo ago
  It's very different to an ipad and keyboard because of the software being a proper OS rather than a phone one. I was a bit torn on Neo vs Air though - the Air's a bit cooler looking.
- themadturk 4mo ago
  The MacBook Air is a better machine, but the Neo is far better than an iPad because MacOS isn't constrained like iPadOS is. The Neo can't really be compared to an iPad for that reason alone.
protocolture 4mo ago
Planning to make my son deal with a broken Debian image.
chillfox 4mo ago
I got my mum onto Apple devices (mac and iPhone) over a decade ago, and support dropped sharply in the first 6 months. These days it's incredibly rare that she needs help with anything, and she does more on the computer than she ever did. The mac has helped her improve here computer skills and confidence in a way that Windows never did.
jimmydddd 4mo ago
My son had a Mac for college. But then the accounting department gave out assignments that required a PC based software package. And it took quite a while to crunch numbers. So I ended up having to get him a relatively high end PC laptop as well. It turns out the professor had never even used the software before. But, that's the academic world.
- ankurdhama 4mo ago
  For such use cases of running some Windows app on Mac you could have tried https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover
stodor89 4mo ago
I unironically like the trackpad and keyboard on the Neo better than Air/Pro's. It's not a perfect laptop, but I promise you people who spend $600 on their computer have never seen anything comparable.
rishabhd 4mo ago
I am typing this from a 6 year old m1 macbook, and it is still going strong. I think even with the recent flaws of macos and instability, the hardware is pretty great, and if you don't like something, you can still hack your way through it. No windows for me, the only reason I used to rely on windows was its vast software array, reversing applicability and videogames. Now that good cross platform reversing tools are available, and I have migrated to PS5, macos just makes the most sense to me. I got it for 800 USD 6 years back, and it has already given me more bang for the buck.
Version467 4mo ago
Yup. Basically the same story here. There’s lots of stuff not to like about macOS, but there’s something about it that makes it click much more for average people. For my partner in particular I noticed that they use way more features than they ever did with windows. Boring stuff like spotlight search to find files, space bar to preview documents, airdrop to send stuff to an iPhone, etc. With windows I got called over constantly for questions like “how do I find x, I forgot where I put it”, “can you help me get this on my phone, I want to send it to <friend>”. It’s not like good solutions for this don’t exist elsewhere, but something about MacBooks make people better at discovering those features. I have secret pet theory that part of it is actually just that people know about Apple stuff that it’s supposed to be intuitive and so they have more confidence in trying to figure it out, which makes them have more success at it and that turns into a positive cycle.
andriy_koval 4mo ago
> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. > It really just works. chromebooks likely need even less attention
- danaris 4mo ago
  Well, and so does a chalkboard, but if what they want is a computer...

by juancn 4mo ago

sgt 4mo ago

I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.

wil421 4mo ago
The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.
- commandersaki 4mo ago
  I think Apple's era of unreliable laptops were the ones with Butterfly keyboards. So many issues back then, but they did a complete 180 once they reintroduced the magic keyboard and then Apple Silicon.
  - raspasov 4mo ago
    Apple Intel laptop + a butterfly keyboard was the absolute gutter tier experience. Not only it was slow and ran hot, but after a few months a random key would get stuck and stop working.
    - frollogaston 4mo ago
      Also touch bar, also was all USB-C at a time when there was 0 adoption (2016). I went out of my way to buy a 2015 model instead, held up for 10 years.
      - wil421 4mo ago
        I was gifted a Touch Bar and bought an M1 air when they came out. It was a night a day difference. Fan speed and throttling killed the experience and Touch Bar was not good.
    - sgt 4mo ago
      I agree that sucked, and I fixed a few of them myself instead of sending to Apple. Got quite good at it.
- havaloc 4mo ago
  Now Mac is almost the same if not cheaper up front, and in the long run too. It's a wild thing to see.
recursive 4mo ago
I got my first ipad a year or two ago. It took me many tries over about an hour to setup the apple account I needed to log in to the device. I wish I had documented the process, because it's so different than what people typically claim about Apple ease of use.
- Insanity 4mo ago
  Interesting experience. I set up 2 iPad pros, basically one shot experience that took a few minutes. Even the first one I owned was straightforward
kstrauser 4mo ago
Some older relatives asked for a computer recommendation. I told them a thousand reasons why a MacBook Air (at that moment) would be perfect for them. They went to Best Buy and came home with the Dellpaq thing that the guy there told them had better specs. Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water. [0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.
- sgt 4mo ago
  The worst thing about those cheaper "Best Buy" Windows machines is that they're heavily laden with all kinds of software making the PC extremely slow from the start. I just don't understand who they can get away with it.
lobf 4mo ago
Yup. Around 2005 my 83 year old grandpa decided he wanted to learn how to use a computer. I told him to just get a Mac- it’s a little more expensive but the user experience is unparalleled, and the Genius Bar offers (do they still?) classes in using your computer if needed. Never had to help him with buggy software, crashes, etc. It just worked.
- sgt 4mo ago
  My grandmother - at 104, was still rocking her iPad! Sending / receiving emails, doing FaceTime, reading the news.

nozzlegear 4mo ago

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.

xp84 4mo ago
They added a second right-click menu in Explorer now. IDK if this is Windows 11 or if 10 had this. When you right-click a file, you get a shorter menu with a larger font. But it might not have the option you want -- you have to click "Show more options" at the bottom. Then it lags for 1 second (this is a Core Ultra 9 with 64GB of RAM btw) and opens a new one, with the old font metrics, and that one also has all the things the original ones did. This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window. I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.
- gopher_space 4mo ago
  If I'm using my old laptop with a slow CPU I get to see Win 11 draw an older GUI I recognize and then cover it with whatever they're doing now.
- Thlom 4mo ago
  I'm on win11 at work and when I right click in explorer it loads the normal menu but then immediately populates the menu with more options. It takes just long enough before it populates more options for you to maybe click on something which has then moved to somewhere else. Extremely annoying.
- juancn 4mo ago

tantalor 4mo ago

Choosing an OS 101 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho... It used to be, > Do you fear technology? > > Yes > Is your daddy rich? > > Yes > MacOS I guess we can remove the second question now.

lowbloodsugar 4mo ago
"Do you fear technology?" should be "Do you have no fucks to give for all the bullshit?" I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.
mezeek 4mo ago
Ah yes, the classic tech guys on Hacker News that fear technology.
- notatoad 4mo ago
  yeah, i think a lot of people on hacker news basically agree with that old meme that says "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."
- uticus 4mo ago
  sometimes the wizards know best when to fear magic
  - weirdmantis69 4mo ago
    fly... you fools...
- panzagl 4mo ago
  Ah yes, the classic Mac user on Hacker News that thinks they're a tech guy. :-)
frollogaston 4mo ago
Yes I fear tech, idc

RZelaya 4mo ago

Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense. I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier. My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.

porridgeraisin 4mo ago
The price thing is really true. My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out. Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh. So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever. Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those. For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well. Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.
- nixass 4mo ago
  > The price thing is really true. No price tag can make me use insufferable MacOS, the same as iOS.

thewebguyd 4mo ago

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users. Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.

infecto 4mo ago
Part of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS. Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.
- bdamm 4mo ago
  How? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well. My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.
  - mountain_peak 4mo ago
    People might not remember, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows. Back then, the Macintosh versions were 1st-class citizens and (and you mention), Windows versions were a buggy mess. Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today. My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.

ndmsksizjs 4mo ago

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adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago

I’ve faced far more issues with relatives with Macs than when they had Linux. The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all. The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system. Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.

wl 4mo ago
I recently had an experience with a family member's Ubuntu LTS machine where it was stuck on an old release, /etc/apt/sources.list needed to be edited because of Ubuntu's obnoxious habit of breaking old repositories, and then I needed to debug apt issues to get do-release-upgrade to actually work. The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.
- imp0cat 4mo ago
  But how old exactly? https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle The 16.04 is still supported and it was released in 2016! So it must have been an even older system, right?
- fragmede 4mo ago
  Eh. You just install codex or Claude code and tell it to fix it for you.
  - pdimitar 4mo ago
    Hell, you can install the gemini/antigravity CLI and use Gemini's free tiers and it will still fix it for you.
juancn 4mo ago
The issue is when it updates. The moment it runs an update all bets are off. It's always audio for me, it breaks in the weirdest ways. Mac updates are the best in the industry, period. Close to zero chance of having an issue (unless you're messing with third-party kernel extensions).

xmeadow 4mo ago

I know what you mean but you will regret your choices Ehen your wife and doughters forget what a wifi-network is.

drnick1 4mo ago

Apple and the NSA must know a lot about you.

bdamm 4mo ago
What are you saying, that you think Windows or Linux are better platforms for evading covert government oversight? Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.
- drnick1 4mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
  - bdamm 4mo ago
    What is your point? If anything, PRISM argues that Apple users are more secure; it took the NSA a solid five years longer to work their way into Apple. But at this point, every provider is compromised, every country is compromised, so again - what is your point? The government knows a lot about everyone, it has nothing to do with choice of computing platform. It is also worth noting that the USA is not the only country collecting data on US persons (and everyone else.) The question is not, does the USA know about you, the question is really, how many governments know all about you and how does that information manifest in your life?
    - drnick1 4mo ago
      > But at this point, every provider is compromised Yes, and its probably fair to assume that Apple and/or the government can access any of your files on your devices or in the cloud. My suggestion is not to use any "provider." Use free software, and keep your data locally on encrypted drives.
      - bdamm 4mo ago

antaviana 4mo ago

My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programmed obsolescence feels as a huge resource waste. It should not be allowed, if anything for environmental reasons.

robertjpayne 4mo ago
I'd still say getting 7 years of free OS supports for hardware is pretty incredible. All-in-ones like iMacs are always going to be wasteful on the environmental side of things faster because displays will outlive the usefulness of the rest of it by a large large margin. At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.
- baq 4mo ago
  I have a 2019 GPU in my windows box and I’d be pissed off if it stopped working in the next few years. Computers nowadays are useful for much longer than they used to. Spectre class vulnerabilities which take 50% performance to properly (kinda) mitigate are the only reason to maybe upgrade if all you do is browse facebook and pay bills.
- taude 4mo ago
  How is the OS Free? It's part of what you pay for. I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it. We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware. EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.
  - bombcar 4mo ago
    In the bad (good?) old days Mac OS X cost money each upgrade.

whateverboat 4mo ago

I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4. It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem. I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise. Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.

rbanffy 4mo ago
Apart from the GUI environment, the Mac is a Unix and I find it hard to notice much difference between it and a Linux. I use MacPorts on my Macs and there is no drama with command line tools. On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.
- DanielHB 4mo ago
  sed has different syntax on macos because macos is based on BSD. Really annoying to get a ticket "fix this build script for macos" and it is freaking sed compatibility issues. edit: to be fair that happened once, but it was annoying
  - rbanffy 4mo ago
    MacPorts provides GNU equivalents to the native BSD ones. You can always check if there is a `gsed` binary and use it (or check the OS, but checking direct behavior is always best). But yes, macOS is a Unix, not a Linux.

greatgib 4mo ago

I easily guess that it is just that you are used to Mac, so you easily "forget" the common issues that you are usually encountering. For example, one of the most common example is icloud subtly enabled by default for syncing photo and data, and that will get your mac and iphone stuck in a complicated mess when things get full with the limited free space.

juancn 4mo ago
Not really, I've been using linux since the Slackware on diskette era. I know my way around recompiling a kernel (used to do it on a 486). I also did dev on Windows, I know the internals pretty well (I even did embedded on CE, writing portable code across CE/95/NT family runtimes). I still prefer Mac, it's much less likely to randomly break, mainly due to the fact that the hardware the software runs on is extremely predictable. I also like the care about muggle usability that Apple tends to pursue (granted, not perfect, but way better than the other two)

porridgeraisin 4mo ago

Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.

micromacrofoot 4mo ago

Yeah exactly, one of my kids has a Windows PC for gaming and just logging in to the thing is arduous sometimes... Microsoft's account auth system is so bad with its random redirects. Don't even me get me started on the parental controls, it's probably one of the laggiest systems I use.

baq 4mo ago
Let’s not pretend Apple screen time is any good. My 13yo daughter figured out multiple ways around it by herself and googled a few more and if it wasn’t leaking like a sieve it isn’t granular enough anyway (e.g. music apps offering videos - I want to block videos but not music - can’t be done)
- micromacrofoot 4mo ago
  Yeah none of them are great, but Microsoft's is awful

jmyeet 4mo ago

As a fellow family IT specialist, about a decade ago I took the stance that if it's not Apple, I'm not fixing it. I'm not dealing with some bullshit issue with weird proprietary drivers or crapware. The straw that broke the camel's back was a Dell laptop that wasn't working with the Wifi until I turned off IPv6. It's also why I don't use Linux for a desktop unless I have to. I've had years of debugging weird issues with drivers, editing /etc files, changing X settings and so on. MacOS isn't perfect. In fact, I think Apple keeps making it worse because they have no real product vision now and it's just a bunch of teams making local changes to justify their own existence. But you can look at MacOS in one of two ways: as a better Windows (by having a UNIX-like core) or as a better Linux (by having a better UI subsystem). Either way it's a win (IMHO). I'm torn on the Macbook Neo, personally. It really is just a giant iPhone 18 with a keyboard. Plus you can get a Macbook Air at times for $900. That's $200 more than the high-end Neo. Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.

Telaneo 4mo ago
> Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me. For anything that's not pure consumption, that's a massive upgrade. A proper keyboard makes a world of difference. You don't need it if all you do is browse and view, and you can manage if you only need to send an email here and there, but I'd never want to program or write longer texts (emails, essays, spreadsheets for that matter) on an iPad, even if I hooked up a keyboard, unless I'm desperate and have no other options.
tim333 4mo ago
It's very different to an ipad and keyboard because of the software being a proper OS rather than a phone one. I was a bit torn on Neo vs Air though - the Air's a bit cooler looking.
themadturk 4mo ago
The MacBook Air is a better machine, but the Neo is far better than an iPad because MacOS isn't constrained like iPadOS is. The Neo can't really be compared to an iPad for that reason alone.

protocolture 4mo ago

Planning to make my son deal with a broken Debian image.

chillfox 4mo ago

I got my mum onto Apple devices (mac and iPhone) over a decade ago, and support dropped sharply in the first 6 months. These days it's incredibly rare that she needs help with anything, and she does more on the computer than she ever did. The mac has helped her improve here computer skills and confidence in a way that Windows never did.

jimmydddd 4mo ago

My son had a Mac for college. But then the accounting department gave out assignments that required a PC based software package. And it took quite a while to crunch numbers. So I ended up having to get him a relatively high end PC laptop as well. It turns out the professor had never even used the software before. But, that's the academic world.

ankurdhama 4mo ago
For such use cases of running some Windows app on Mac you could have tried https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

stodor89 4mo ago

I unironically like the trackpad and keyboard on the Neo better than Air/Pro's. It's not a perfect laptop, but I promise you people who spend $600 on their computer have never seen anything comparable.

rishabhd 4mo ago

I am typing this from a 6 year old m1 macbook, and it is still going strong. I think even with the recent flaws of macos and instability, the hardware is pretty great, and if you don't like something, you can still hack your way through it. No windows for me, the only reason I used to rely on windows was its vast software array, reversing applicability and videogames. Now that good cross platform reversing tools are available, and I have migrated to PS5, macos just makes the most sense to me. I got it for 800 USD 6 years back, and it has already given me more bang for the buck.

Version467 4mo ago

Yup. Basically the same story here. There’s lots of stuff not to like about macOS, but there’s something about it that makes it click much more for average people. For my partner in particular I noticed that they use way more features than they ever did with windows. Boring stuff like spotlight search to find files, space bar to preview documents, airdrop to send stuff to an iPhone, etc. With windows I got called over constantly for questions like “how do I find x, I forgot where I put it”, “can you help me get this on my phone, I want to send it to <friend>”. It’s not like good solutions for this don’t exist elsewhere, but something about MacBooks make people better at discovering those features. I have secret pet theory that part of it is actually just that people know about Apple stuff that it’s supposed to be intuitive and so they have more confidence in trying to figure it out, which makes them have more success at it and that turns into a positive cycle.

andriy_koval 4mo ago

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. > It really just works. chromebooks likely need even less attention

danaris 4mo ago
Well, and so does a chalkboard, but if what they want is a computer...