Context: this is a legit screenshot I took on my workplace around 1.5 years ago. Hopefully it’s been patched by now? Completely ridiculous behavior
Yea… I hate the shit out of M$FT but I’m still never going to buy a fucking Mac.
And I use it everywhere I can.
You’re talking about OS/2 Warp right? Or do you mean ChromeOS?
…
Oh wait, I get it… you were talking about SunOS.
No, no, they meant Plan 9
!plan9@lemmy.sdf.org
My opinion is that apple makes some very nice products and they tend to work together well, since they control all the hardware and software. However, their products are overpriced and I can get similar performance at half the cost from other vendors.
Not to talk shit about Mac users, but in this day and age with how advanced technology is, you have to be insane to buy a Mac. What kills it for me is that nothing is upgradeable on the damn thing, like zero. If your internal drive dies, you’re SOL. And if I got this correctly, they now have the bios OS on the same drive, the Internal. So, you won’t even be able to get to your bios. You won’t be able to install the OS on external hard drive in case you needed to. This is insane and I can never understand why anyone would buy into this shit.
I’ll tell you why: the best hardware and software that just works with it. No need to deal with drivers or any of that shit.
I still use my MacBook Pro 2011 and I can’t find a reason to change it. It just keeps working. And I say that with a 2023 MacBook Pro M2 sitting right next to it (work laptop). Sure, it’s faster, but that’s it.
“just works” if you’ve got the fps set to 60 on an M1/M2 macbook and update the OS, you’ve bricked it.
I’ve never changed the fps. Why would I do that? It’s not a gaming machine.
I guess that’s reasonable. I personally can’t see myself ever getting one for the reasons I’ve mentioned. But hey, everyone does what makes them happy.
I couldn’t imagine buying any laptop other than a Mac because the performance to battery life ratio on everything else is awful. Plus if you want a UNIX system, it’s an easy buy.
After owning an Apple ARM laptop I’d never go back to anything else.
I have an M1 Macbook Air (under half price secondhand thanks to a superficial dent on a corner) and while I agree I love having such powerful hardware that sips battery so sparingly, MacOS can go eat a whole bag of stale dicks. Homebrew makes it… tolerable, but I’m holding out hope for that new Qualcomm ARM laptop - the recent benchmarks beat Apple’s chips handily.
What do you hate about macOS? From my perspective, it beats out Windows in ease of use, performance, likelihood not to break, and being *NIX; and it beats out Linux by having things working out of the box without needing to spend a decade tinkering just to get things almost working right.
I use Windows for gaming (and work, unfortunately), Mac for general computing and programming, and Linux for servers and vms.
You can install Linux on it, the only major things not working yet are speakers and deep sleep
the performance to battery life ratio on everything else is awful
You clearly haven’t used Debian.
The arm macs are really fast and the battery life is great. With that said I’m not shelling out for one. I’ll gladly take one if my job pays for it.
I get the fast and the battery life and all that, but by principle, I just can never own one. I also never buy any windows laptop that is not upgradeable. I keep them for a while and want to be able to upgrade them. That’s why I’ve been thinking of getting a framework laptop.
Mac users, and actually most laptop users, don’t give a shit about the things you mention. They buy it, use it for some 2-5 years, then sell it and get a new model. Upgrading hardware is way too complicated for most people. They don’t know or care what a BIOS is. It comes with the OS installed and that’s the only thing they would ever want. Turn it on, use Safari, outlook, and office 365, maybe some tool like Photoshop/Ableton/etc, that’s it.
I mean iPhones are the same right? They lock down everything so it’s idiot proof and they control the environment exactly so they can maximise the smoothness of the experience.
I half agree but the idea that Macs aren’t as expressive or versatile as any other laptop is so antiquated now. More than half of the software engineering industry is using macs as primary machines.
Why? Because the software and hardware gets out of the fucking way and let’s you focus on getting things done. I remember a time before Macs were the popular choice and I remember everyone spending 25% of their time fighting with drivers or obscure machine-specific software install or development build issues.
Even getting rid of the bloat is easy. Highlight apps, drag them to recycle bin, done. And as you said, a 3-5 year upgrade cycle makes the premium far less of an issue.
I certainly have family members that use Macs because they are tech illiterate, but that’s further evidence of their versatility.
There’s so much to shit on Apple for, but the myth of Macs being in some obscure home computer niche needs to die.
I’ve been using windows PCs for 25 years and struggle with the damn Mac at work. The usability of the thing is just utter garbage. Nothing is better but everything is different just… because. I’ve wasted so much time learning the fucking thing and still nothing just works.
Want to take a screenshot? Press 3 keys. You better remember them because it’s the most random fuckery imaginable. You like the cut & paste shortcuts of windows? We’ve something similar except it doesn’t work everywhere for some reason. This shit goes on and on.
I don’t know why Apple hates a proper Taskbar. I miss it everytime I struggle to find one of my open applications. Which is always.
I have to use an apple phone for work and it’s sorta annoying to use. Like sure it’s fast and snappy but there’s no back button and it isn’t as intuitive as Apple users want you to believe it is.
I have to use an iPad for work. I was also forced to use one of their phones as a while back. I have unhappily used the iOS system for about 7 years now.
A few additional things:
I have attempted to use multitasking on it. Every update changed it’s behavior and they are all unintuitive. I gave up and use my phone for the second task.
The settings menu can burn in hell. It’s an absolute hot mess that’s worse than anything else I have seen.
I use a Bluetooth keyboard at times. In order to use it I have to leave an annoying floating “accessibility” circle on the screen when it’s not connected. In order to turn it off, it’s buried somewhere in the hellish settings menu.
Apps crash about 2x more often on it than on any other system I have used. Especially after an update before the inevitable small fix comes out a few weeks later.
The updates go through an endless cycle of adding bugs then killing bugs then adding new bugs. One of my favorites bug was when I had the phone years ago. They somehow broke the search functions in contacts and took them 4 months to fix it. My company had loaded 3,000 corporate contacts Into the phone… Fun times.
Then there are all the hidden gestures that are completely illogical. I turn gestures off on my android phone for a reason.
The problem with Apple OSs is that Apple decides how you are suppose to use the device.
They decide that a phone/tablet/laptop is suppose to be used in a certain way and if you try to use them like a different computer form factor, you are left confused and frustrated.
I have been a long time user of Linux, Android, and Windows. I have no Apple devices and never will because every time I am forced to use one I can’t figure out how to do the simplist things that is trivial on every other OS I have used. Not to mention they won’t let you customize the device how you want to use it.
They do have a fantastic aesthetic and OS if you want a phone/tablet/laptop that does the simplist low-effort use, but I am always lost when trying do do anything outside of Apple’s groove. They are all looks and no substance.
It’s just what people are used to. I find a few stuff annoying when I use my android phone for work. Also, you can swipe left anywhere to go back. Didn’t feel the need for a button
This is insane and I can never understand why anyone would buy into this shit.
Because the new ones are obscenely fast and getting faster. Like, I never thought I’d be a Mac owner. As a teenager I thought they were cool, but that was because I was a bit of a hipster and I never had the money for one. My interest died as I got older, though I’ve still thought about getting older ones (like the iMac G3) as a novelty for fun. Then Apple started releasing the (new) Apple ARM Macs and they caught my attention. They appear to be so ridiculously fast that really the only thing stopping me from buying one is that they’d still be a downgrade from my current setup, simply because my GPU has more features than Macs do. However, with the newest version of Apple Silicon supposedly supporting raytracing, my interest is starting to reach a boiling point. I haven’t really kept up with benchmarks since the prior versions weren’t really game-oriented, but if Apple keeps walking into the game market and they do it successfully, then they might actually get my money despite being overpriced. Why? Not Microsoft and (I assume) will have decent drivers for graphics.
(Inb4 “Linux has great drivers!” Yeah, for Radeon. Not so much for Nvidia. Guess which kind of GPU I have. And yes, I kinda need an Nvidia GPU because the majority of gpu-accelerated computing is still leashed to Nvidia)
M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.
If a BIOS update fails on them, they don’t have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.
The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.
I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.
It’s at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can’t run the recovery from any other OS.
Absolute baloney from Apple.
The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you’ll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason
I hate Apple, but my Lenovo does exactly the same. It fucking installs BIOS updates automatically without any warning. Once, after a reboot it was hanging too much on a black screen and I thought it just froze, so I forced a shutdown by long pressing the power button. Luckily the BIOS restored via the fallback, but that wiped the TPM for some reason and because windows 11 on laptops automatically encrypts the drive with bitlocker I might have lost everything (luck again, I’m part of the 1% of the bitlocker users that actually keep an offline backup of the encryption key)
At least (I’m guessing, never bought any M1 Mac and will never do it) apple should be smart enough to disable the power button during BIOS updates, and maybe postpone the update on a low battery, leaving the danger only to desktop users
That’s not necessarily a lenovo specific thing, windows can update bios if enabled (has been enabled by default of every modern windows device I own). When vendors push a new bios to the update catalog it’s going to get automatically installed by default. Look for a setting in the security panel of the bios to turn this off, can’t remember exactly what it’s called.
Apple: “You’re not using your mac how we designed it to. Please pay $4000 more to use the right side usb-c without issues”.
Apple users have to jump through so many hoops just to look down on everyone else
I know nobody asked, but the reputation Macs have amongst IT industry professionals is insanely annoying to me. I guess it’s a difference between what I like in a laptop versus what other people like in them.
I’ve seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines. And I’m just sitting here, like…why? You are locked into an inferior operating system that becomes progressively more janky the deeper you get into its configuration. I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the “modifier key” for the fucking mouse, so you can change your mouse’s modifier key to its ctrl or shift key, apparently. Y’know, in case your standard 20 dollar Logitech wired mouse, like the one I’m using, has shift and modifier keys. Just super useful /s. It randomly had slack muted after installing it, so I could never get message notifications until I figured out what to alter after digging through the guts of its terrible system configuration UI. It can’t remember the order of attached displays and half the time I have to rearrange them after resuming it from hibernation. If you want to do basic window manager things, like press the meta key (also referred to as the windows key on non-macbooks) + direction arrow to have a window snap to a quadrant of your screen, you have to install a 3rd party application with Homebrew. Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device. With any luck you don’t have to compile anything for it, because…you probably won’t be able to. Perhaps most annoying is the fact that, even if you want to use it as a full desktop replacement and plug in 3 monitors with the same resolution into it at a desk (most Macs have at least passable 3rd party dock support), the Mac just won’t let you. It only lets you plug in 2 and it duplicates one of those two onto the 3rd one. If you want to plug in 3, you technically can: you just have to download 3rd party displaylink drivers, which, knowing Apple, probably won’t fucking work and might permanently fuck up your display.
I get that it’s a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that’s purely because it’s an extremely optimized ARM based processor that’s only designed to work with this specific operating system. I also get that machines running Linux also have their own problems, but you aren’t paying for whatever Linux distro you’re running (probably) and you also have the power to change things with a little bit of effort. If I’m buying a machine like an M1, where the OS is presumably part of the whole “package,” it should just work well out of the box.
Beyond those complaints, it’s got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat. If they could run linux and had decent keyboards, I might like them. But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point. I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc. But you can install any Linux distro (that isn’t Nix based, sadly) to it without issue and its keyboard makes it actually tolerable to code on for extended periods. I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it’s the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.
The vast majority of comments here complaining about Mac and macOS specifically seem to stem from really, really not understanding much about them. This comment is unfortunately not any different.
I’ve seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines.
The FAANG companies that fight tooth and nail to hire the best people who can basically work wherever they want because of their skill like Macs? Surely, they’re the dumb ones.
I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the “modifier key” for the fucking mouse
Originally, and for quite a while (probably early 2000’s) Macs shipped with a one button mouse, and there was no concept of a “right-click.” Originally, they were pretty dogmatic that the OS should be simple enough that one button was enough. You shouldn’t need to hide functionality in a context menu, it should be available through the standard UI. Eventually, that lost out, but they decided they wanted to make context menus* (or other “right-click” actions) a power user feature, rather than a default. So the decided to make it make sense for all of the machines that had always shipped with one button mice, you could hold ctrl and then click an item and you’d get the context menu. For decades now, they support right click, but if you built up years of muscle memory around ctrl+clicking instead, you still can.
like press the meta key
You like the meta key? Probably better thank Apple. Apple has had a “meta” key basically forever, only it’s been called “command.” I’m old enough to remember when more manufacturers started to add their own meta keys. If you go grab an older keyboard, you’ll probably find they also have a “context menu” button, which is basically a “right-click” and you almost def won’t find one now.
you want to do basic window manager things
Lots of people in this thread seem to really, really like being able to window snap, which I kind of get but also generally disagree with. macOS (again, going back a thousand years) has a different philosophy when it comes to managing windows. On [MS] Windows, pretty much all software aims for full screen, and users def do the same. Window snapping now means you have a convenient way to see 2 whole things. If you really, really want window snapping similar to how MS does it, there are a hojillion ways to accomplish this with very simple app installs. macOS has instead tried to make it so that you can manage multiple apps/windows easily without full screen, going back to tiny, tiny screens.
But let’s talk about “basic window manager things” for a sec. Windows has easily, and I mean easily had the worst window management generally for like 2 decades. Windows 10 and Windows 11 help catch up to things I switched off of Windows and to Linux for in like, 2004. Expose, or “Task View” as it’s now called in Windows started in macOS, and was adopted in Linux in the mid 2000’s. Not until Windows 10, and not even the first version, do we get that. Ditto for virtual desktops. In Windows, I can press alt-tab and switch between any open app. In macOS, I can press cmd+tab and switch between any open app, but I can also press cmd-` and switch between an app’s windows. In Windows, I can minimize windows to the task bar just as I can in macOS. However, I can also just choose to hide all app windows, or hide all windows except the app I’m looking at. And on macOS, I can use hot corners (which Windows barely touches with its “show desktop” hotcorner, sort of) which I can configure however I want. I can throw my mouse in any corner of the screen and get more “basic window manager things” than exist on Windows.
Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device
If you have one the bad butterfly keyboards, yes. If not, this is nonsense. All laptop keyboards are bad, mac versions (with the very large caveat that the butterfly keyboards were insanely stupid/bad) are generally better.
I get that it’s a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that’s purely because it’s an extremely optimized ARM based processor that’s only designed to work with this specific operating system.
How is this supposed to be a negative? If we zoom out a little, this comment might as well be “oh sure, you can get your fancy graphic effects when you use a, what did you call it? graphics processing unit?” And even then, this is still not really accurately understanding why Apple has absolutely dominated CPU in mobile, and then is crushing in the class of laptop/desktop processors it competes in.**
But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point.
Aside from darwin, the kernel macOS runs on, Webkit, the browser engine that Chrome forked from, or passkeys, the thing that might replace passwords, you’re still really wrong.
Beyond those complaints, it’s got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat.
How about screens? Trackpad? Physical material, etc?
I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc.
“I can get vastly less done, and it’s going to be more uncomfortable the entire time.”
I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it’s the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.
Lots of misunderstanding here, but I’m already a phone book in.
* really, they probably never would have added right clicks, but as more software adopted right click actions, especially cross platform stuff like Adobe software, they pretty much had to.
** they’ve basically ceded the extreme high end. If you really want the most performant CPU and power\heat aren’t a concern, it’s not Apple.
This is a perfect example of corporate apologia combined with not really understanding the sentiment to which you are replying. Hell, I even started my rant by saying “I guess it’s a difference between what I like in a laptop versus what other people like in them.” Also there is something really pathetic about being defensive of a corporate product about which another person has elements that they find annoying or unintuitive. Nothing you have said counters any factual observation about the behavior of the system and can be effectively dismissed on the basis that the foundational premise of every statement is “well no system is perfect.” Yeah, there are flaws with everything. I happen to dislike the specific flaws with Mac more than I dislike the specific flaws of most Linux distros or Windows. Windows largely gets a pass on the basis that I’m not forced to use it for work or any kind of power user shit. I’m expected to do that with a Mac, which amplifies the amount of negative feelings I have towards it. Familiarity breeds contempt. This is not a new facet of reality only I’ve discovered, hopefully. If I had to work on a Windows machine fulltime I’d probably hate it about as much as I do the Mac. But then again, it would be kind of weird to come into a thread specifically about Macs and start ranting about Windows sucking. Which is what you’re doing in a lot of this reply. So…yeah, maybe go outside and touch some grass because somebody doesn’t like your favorite OS and elected to comment in a thread where that was the topic of discussion.
That said, a few specific points:
Lots of people in this thread seem to really, really like being able to window snap, which I kind of get but also generally disagree with
You can’t disagree with people liking something. You can dislike something yourself, but someone else enjoying a particular feature is super weird and comes across as bizarrely authoritative.
All laptop keyboards are bad
There’s not even an argument to make here. You’re just wrong. Comparative to the Macs, there are other manufacturers that produce far better quality keyboards than those found on pretty much any Macbook.
How is this supposed to be a negative?
It’s because the battery quality is an extension of having a very specific operating system running on a very specific processor. It’s an incredibly tight coupling of software and hardware. Yes, it’s highly optimized, but the optimization comes at the cost of having to use their shitty operating system. Linux will run on almost anything. You don’t get the level of efficiency, maybe, but you do have control. I value control over the things I own and use over virtually everything else.
Aside from darwin, the kernel macOS runs on, Webkit, the browser engine that Chrome forked from, or passkeys, the thing that might replace passwords, you’re still really wrong.
Well, first of all, darwin is based on FreeBSD, which was already open source, so, not like they blazed new trails there. That said, let’s ignore Apple’s walled garden ecosystem and their longstanding opposition to right to repair, which they only caved on recently because of pending legislation. Or the fact that Apple hardware is effectively non-modifiable after purchase by design. You mentioned something about graphics cards. You know what’s neat about graphics cards? The ones that aren’t integrated can be replaced or changed. Good luck changing something yourself in a fucking Mac. There’s also a lot of open source projects that have been restricted from the App store because open source licenses are generally incompatible with App Store TOS. And, while Darwin might be open source, a ton of components for iOS and their iPadOS are not. And before you say, “well, what about Microsoft, huuuuuuuh?” Yeah, they suck too. Multiple, different things can be bad for the same reason.
How about screens? Trackpad? Physical material, etc?
Screens are overly glossy for my taste. Trackpad quality is average, although the physical buttons for the trackpad have this weird “thocky” response that makes them feel as cheap and shitty as their awful keyboard. Physical material is also average. These are things I left out because I personally don’t care about them very much.
“I can get vastly less done, and it’s going to be more uncomfortable the entire time.”
I guess you ignored the part where I said good things that I like about that specific device which allows me to be more productive on it than on my Mac. Or is your entire post purely an exercise in misrepresentation and intellectual dishonesty? Which would be appropriate for something written in praise of Apple products.
Does it bother you that you can’t grasp a simple feature like Mouse Keys?
https://support.apple.com/en-au/guide/mac-help/mh27469/14.0/mac/14.0
Your rant is completely misguided but I thought I would at least point out something useful.
Oh wow, a Mac enthusiast with abysmal reading comprehension skills. How rare /s.
I believe many of the display issues were fixed with the M2. And you don’t need brew to install a window manager, although the fact that brew lets you treat it like a linux box is great.
The system configuration is more about what you’re used to than anything else. I haven’t used Windows in a couple of decades, and I absolutely hate it. Can’t even think of going back. The modern version looks like a tablet OS trying to pass as a desktop OS. Give me a Windows machine and the first thing I’ll do is wipe it clean and install Ubuntu. But I’m also sure Windows is great for you. So it’s what we’re used to. Nothing wrong with it.
I loved win XP, but it’s been steeply down hill since then, to this unbearable toddler ui. So I’m with you on that one. I’ve been on *nix for 20+ years now.
If you want to do basic window manager things, like press the meta key (also referred to as the winows key on non-macbooks) + direction arrow to have a window snap to a quadrant of your screen, you have to install a 3rd party application with Homebrew.
you don’t need brew to install a window manager, although the fact that brew lets you treat it like a linux box is great.
Please tell me more.
My new job gave me a Mac. First one I’ve used … that has a colour screen, and boy have things (and myself) changed in the interim. I spent the entire first day figuring out what the buttons even do. Am I really expected to use the mouse (well, trackpad) this much? The first port replicator I bought only did one screen, I’m hoping the one now in the mail does better…
I believe many of the display issues were fixed with the M2
I have an M2 and it has literally every display issue I’ve talked about here.
But I’m also sure Windows is great for you
I hate Windows. I have a single Windows machine that I use for a few specific things and then like…5 linux machines. And then the M2.
Asahi actually came up with a conformant OpenGL ES driver for the M1+2s before Apple has.
Not trying to be rude, but this is terrible advice. Asahi Linux is nowhere near ready for use on a work computer.
Last I heard it’s still in beta, which isn’t advisable if it’s your main work machine
I’m forced to use a Mac for work as well and have the damn Slack bug. What’s the solution!?
For me, it was the “Allow Notifications” setting for the “Slack” app in the “Notifications & Focus” dialog of “System Preferences.” And apparently like most terrible Mac related things, if it isn’t working as you would expect by default, then that just means its “working as designed.”
It never produces heat. Until it does and my word does it. I’ve been getting the slack issues and display issues as well. Also found out today the provided calendar hasn’t actually been sending off my invite responses to anyone and got called in for not letting people know which meetings I was attending.
I wonder if the reason mine never produces any heat is because I use it as a 2500 dollar Slack and Outlook machine. Any true dev work takes place on my Thinkpad running Endeavor. Also Slack is like the poster child for Javascript tech debt because it was written in Electron. It’ll run literally anywhere, but make you wish it didn’t because it’ll hoard your system’s resources like a fucking dragon. Damn thing is bloated as hell and it won’t even let you schedule statuses in case you’re out of office for specific hours on set days. We should all go back to IRC. It’s not pretty, but at least you can automate shit on IRC without having to beg a third party company like Slack for an API token and without taking up 14 gigs of RAM in order to render a clown emoji.
Seriously. I have a co-worker that tries to convert everyone to use apple products. The iPad I have from work needs to have a battery charged to x% before you can turn it on, no matter if a charger is plugged in.
Oh, you want to change the default search engine in Safari? Here, pick one out of this list or gtfo. You want to use add-ons in Firefox? Ha! They’re not certified, so there’s no native expansion shop on iOS.
Thanks, I like to customize my own OS and not be bullied into what I’m allowed to do with it.
Laughs in framework with four identical USB-C ports that can do anything
That’s actually not true, and framework has similar issues. There was vampire power drains from certain mix and match options with HDMI and USB-C ports.
https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-high-battery-drain-during-suspend/3736
On the AMD framework, the upper right and left USB-C ports are slightly different from the lower ports
https://community.frame.work/t/usb4-and-thunderbolt-on-amd/30771
I love my framework laptop, but we shouldn’t pretend that they are free from quirks that plague other brands.
