You know, over the last few years, I’ve gained a begrudging respect for Apple. They really care about UX, Ui, build quality, OS efficiency, battery life, and they’re even the best value proposition at several price tiers. I main Fedora and GrapheneOS at home, yes, but I enjoy macOS and iOS at work. macOS has some of those key professional applications that haven’t made it to Linux yet.
Apple is a pretty easy 2nd place in most areas, 1st for laptops specifically. Windows & ChromeOS can fight for 3rd but they’re miles below macOS and Linux.
build quality generation after generation got worse.
os efficiency, my iPad is TERRIBLE…
They actively sabotage old devices to make their performance and battery life /worse/ so it makes new devices feel better…
then you say “best value”. that’s some major copium. what value is there in a $2000 device with $180 worth of components, a locked down ecosystem that tracks everything you do, scans all your data and sabotages your applications…
I remember first gen iPhones. I had one. I still have lots of classic apple hardware. you are literally sounding like a apple care technician.
They got pretty bad in the mid to late 10s, but build quality is a lot better now. No iPhone bend-gate level stuff in a while.
This did happen. Supposedly they stopped after they got fined. You can say liquid glass is a less blatant version of that hidden as a feature, but as far as I can tell they don’t directly do the “slow down” button for new hardware. And if we’re going to talk bloat, Microsoft is far worse. Linux is holding out for us.
You can get an M5 Air for under a thousand bucks with an education discount, which isn’t verified. I’d go for the 24 GB RAM 512 storagw version which would bring you to 1200. Might be able to snag an M4 for even cheaper The Neo has a better chip than anything close to its price range of $500. You won’t be able to find better build quality OR specs for that price range, let alike both. Believe me, I remember when they were overpriced 2k Intel machines. They’re not that anymore, they’re the gold standard, and looking even better with how Windows laptop manufacturers have gotten so greedy. You can barely find anything at all decent for under 1k.
macOS is demonstrably better for privacy than Windows. Better than Linux? Of course not. Sabotaging apps? Huh?
At the end of the day, I try to get whoever I can convince to go to Linux. I try to convince whoever I can to get a desktop instead of a laptop, especially for gaming. But if they NEED a laptop, or if they NEED apps that aren’t on Linux, especially creative apps like Adobe and CAD, I’m sure not going to recommend Windows, from any perspective, hardware or software. So its going to be a Macbook.
Yet over here as someone who has used macOS professionally for over a decade, I feel like I’m watching the slow deterioration of the operating system as they ignore the wants and wishes of professional users and make the whole thing more and more like a mobile OS with every update.
And at the same time it feels like the number of bugs and broken features which Apple were historically careful to control are getting worse as they prioritise moving fast over being robust.
They are still outperforming Microsoft in every user-centric metric IMO (and by a long way) but the current trajectory absolutely feels like things are getting worse, not better.
I used macos for over a decade, and kept getting Kore and more frustrated with the ui and ux decisions apple kept making. Now I use Linux on my computers and am so.much happier. Linux has its problems, but at least I can fix most of those problems. I’m not forced to use anything.
On my phone I use graphene os, and while I hate dome of the ui/ux of the base aosp, at least it’s not sucking up all my data.
They moved their desktops to ARM, now they have a single architecture to maintain. It just makes sense to dumb it down so they can ship one OS for everything they make. After all, people will blindly buy it anyway.
I am curious to know what features you’re referring to. I’m not saying they don’t exist, I’m relatively new to the Mac train after all and I tend to not be as plugged into the Apple community because uh…well you know. The only thing I’ve heard is some people not liking liquid glass for a potential performance hit, but I haven’t seen any tbh. They’re also dumping Rosetta soon but I think it’s been a reasonable enough amount of time.
Wifi refusing to connect to some access points with no indication of why. Keyboard shortcut to change desktop spaces stops working when USB monitor is connnected. That sort of annoyance that never used to happen.
And then just the general direction of travel. More AI. Getting increasingly difficult to install unverified apps. User consent still seems to be there and things are usually opt in and not out (which is great) but the nudge towards cloud is just that bit stronger all the time, and every update I’m watching for shenanigans.
If you’re new to macOS and coming from Windows then everything probably seems pretty awesome in comparison - and it is - but I don’t have the same trust as I used to.
That’s not the problem. With the false positive they were hearing people during everyday interactions. I remember my colleague bothered by the fact they were hearing people having sex, talking about drugs, all the while with personal information written on screen.
Do you want some guy in Apple headquarter hears some random snippet of your life because you pronounced the word “Shiny” and the model messed up?
I meant more if you have knowledge about something that wasn’t publicly known. This was 7 years ago and got btfo’d, hence the article about the firings you posted. Also everyone I know turns off Siri because it is useless.
No but for real, that was one of the main reasons it took me so long to test Fedora. I associated fedoras (and Linux in general) with sweaty basement dwellers for many years. Not to mention “red hat” has a different connotation than it did in the 90s. Yeesh. But I’m glad I got over it, Fedora works the best for my needs and Linux isn’t nearly as hard as it’s made out to be. Might try Cachy at some point though.
People still associate Linux to command line without a GUI and lack of compatibility with hardware. But, honestly, besides some issues with drivers on OpenSUSE 15 years ago, I have not had any issues with Linux ever.
For sure, it isn’t even only the corporate or specifically beginner focused distros that are like this these days either. Most distros have gotten with the program of having GUI choices for most things, easy ways to install proprietary drivers if they weren’t allowed tk bundle them already, and even their own ecosystem like an app store.
Some FOSS software does not work as a full replacement for missing professional software, but that’s about all that comes to mind as far as issues.
MacBooks are just better. Even before apple silicon they had a distinct fit and finish advantage, but now with the M series chips they are just on a completely different level.
Have to agree. I used to write their laptops off as a joke before 2020 due to them having the worst feeling/least reliable keyboard and having overheating issues, however they addressed every issue I had with their laptops when they debuted the M1 models. This seriously made me change my opinion of Apple overall and even the new MacBook Neo is impressive for the price too.
Hardware specs have gone up, prices have come down, competition prices have gone up, competition software has gone way down. The only way I’d recommend a laptop besides a Macbook is if you can find some nice second hand or refurbished laptops, preferably lightly used business class and/or from an auction. And even then, I’d only recommend it if they’re wanting to commit tk Linux and need a laptop specifically, or need a Windows only application. Vendors are really out here selling Windows laptops with 8 GB RAM, horrendous build quality, at damn near 1k. My work provided Windows machine is an i7 (2024 I think, maybe 2023) 32 GB RAM and sits at 16 GB RAM with my basic set of Office applications and browser tabs open. My work provided Mac has an M2 and 8 GB RAM, sits at a little under 7 GB RAM, and feels less laggy with the same programs and tabs open.
Desktops are a different story, though in specific use cases, Mac Studio/Mini/iMac are decent options too.
ever heard of Linux and Framework? arm is great for phones, doesn’t belong In a laptop…
M1(and successors) are amazing processors. but, being stuck into a ecosystem for one is not worth it. I for one cannot wait for full size RISCV CPU cores… honestly, the market desperately needs a shakeup from all of this “I didn’t have a choice, so I chose the most expensive thing that met my minimum specs” copium.
?? I’m not following. sure you can run arm based CPUs as a mobile device, but performance of large applications or x86 applications is poor.
there is also the addressable memory space issue that exists due to most arm core designs targeting phones… the bus is super limited, despite the architecture technically supporting much much more.
current RiscV cores suffer this same flaw as well.
the reason arm cores have better battery life is they are designed with phones in mind… not a desktop cpu. x86 mobile CPUs are cut down desktop CPUs with tdp restrictions. there is a massive difference as a result.
we are talking completely different design philosophies. it’s like comparing a ebike to a sports car… sure the ebike gets great energy economy when you scale the batteries. it’s half petal powered and has tiny draws on lightweight frame. it’s apples to oranges.
motorcycles would be more apt, but for arm, none really exist outside of obscenely priced workstations.
Lol definitely not a bot. I’ve always been more of an Apple hater due to the ecosystem and business practices, but they’ve turned it around a lot in the 2020s. They’re still a trillion dollar company and not to be trusted, but yeah, they make great laptops.
I main Linux on my desktop and old laptops, like I mentioned. You can say ARM doesn’t belongin laptops but Apple has proven that’s not true. They outperform just about any chip, with battery life efficiency that is not even approachable by any other laptop chips. That’s just the facts. You can spend 3k for a laptop chip that is as good in performance as an M5 (which costs 1k), or you can get a Snapdragon chip that is almost as good as an M5 for efficiency, for over 1k. But not both. That’s where we’re at. Intel especially is asleep at the wheel. At least AMD is making good desktop CPUs still.
I’m also excited for RISC V, I’m considering getting one on an SBC to make a CyberDeck out of. It’s not come as far as ARM yet but it’s promising and we need an open standard.
You know, over the last few years, I’ve gained a begrudging respect for Apple. They really care about UX, Ui, build quality, OS efficiency, battery life, and they’re even the best value proposition at several price tiers. I main Fedora and GrapheneOS at home, yes, but I enjoy macOS and iOS at work. macOS has some of those key professional applications that haven’t made it to Linux yet.
Apple is a pretty easy 2nd place in most areas, 1st for laptops specifically. Windows & ChromeOS can fight for 3rd but they’re miles below macOS and Linux.
what are you talking about.
Ux/UI has slipped over the last decade.
build quality generation after generation got worse.
os efficiency, my iPad is TERRIBLE…
They actively sabotage old devices to make their performance and battery life /worse/ so it makes new devices feel better…
then you say “best value”. that’s some major copium. what value is there in a $2000 device with $180 worth of components, a locked down ecosystem that tracks everything you do, scans all your data and sabotages your applications…
I remember first gen iPhones. I had one. I still have lots of classic apple hardware. you are literally sounding like a apple care technician.
They got pretty bad in the mid to late 10s, but build quality is a lot better now. No iPhone bend-gate level stuff in a while.
This did happen. Supposedly they stopped after they got fined. You can say liquid glass is a less blatant version of that hidden as a feature, but as far as I can tell they don’t directly do the “slow down” button for new hardware. And if we’re going to talk bloat, Microsoft is far worse. Linux is holding out for us.
You can get an M5 Air for under a thousand bucks with an education discount, which isn’t verified. I’d go for the 24 GB RAM 512 storagw version which would bring you to 1200. Might be able to snag an M4 for even cheaper The Neo has a better chip than anything close to its price range of $500. You won’t be able to find better build quality OR specs for that price range, let alike both. Believe me, I remember when they were overpriced 2k Intel machines. They’re not that anymore, they’re the gold standard, and looking even better with how Windows laptop manufacturers have gotten so greedy. You can barely find anything at all decent for under 1k.
macOS is demonstrably better for privacy than Windows. Better than Linux? Of course not. Sabotaging apps? Huh?
At the end of the day, I try to get whoever I can convince to go to Linux. I try to convince whoever I can to get a desktop instead of a laptop, especially for gaming. But if they NEED a laptop, or if they NEED apps that aren’t on Linux, especially creative apps like Adobe and CAD, I’m sure not going to recommend Windows, from any perspective, hardware or software. So its going to be a Macbook.
Yet over here as someone who has used macOS professionally for over a decade, I feel like I’m watching the slow deterioration of the operating system as they ignore the wants and wishes of professional users and make the whole thing more and more like a mobile OS with every update.
And at the same time it feels like the number of bugs and broken features which Apple were historically careful to control are getting worse as they prioritise moving fast over being robust.
They are still outperforming Microsoft in every user-centric metric IMO (and by a long way) but the current trajectory absolutely feels like things are getting worse, not better.
100% this.
I used macos for over a decade, and kept getting Kore and more frustrated with the ui and ux decisions apple kept making. Now I use Linux on my computers and am so.much happier. Linux has its problems, but at least I can fix most of those problems. I’m not forced to use anything.
On my phone I use graphene os, and while I hate dome of the ui/ux of the base aosp, at least it’s not sucking up all my data.
yep, hardware became better. Software became worse
They moved their desktops to ARM, now they have a single architecture to maintain. It just makes sense to dumb it down so they can ship one OS for everything they make. After all, people will blindly buy it anyway.
It’s all just MacOS anyway so they just stopped shipping the x86 build it’s not really a great loss.
I am curious to know what features you’re referring to. I’m not saying they don’t exist, I’m relatively new to the Mac train after all and I tend to not be as plugged into the Apple community because uh…well you know. The only thing I’ve heard is some people not liking liquid glass for a potential performance hit, but I haven’t seen any tbh. They’re also dumping Rosetta soon but I think it’s been a reasonable enough amount of time.
For me it’s mostly small but annoying issues.
Wifi refusing to connect to some access points with no indication of why. Keyboard shortcut to change desktop spaces stops working when USB monitor is connnected. That sort of annoyance that never used to happen.
And then just the general direction of travel. More AI. Getting increasingly difficult to install unverified apps. User consent still seems to be there and things are usually opt in and not out (which is great) but the nudge towards cloud is just that bit stronger all the time, and every update I’m watching for shenanigans.
If you’re new to macOS and coming from Windows then everything probably seems pretty awesome in comparison - and it is - but I don’t have the same trust as I used to.
They spy on people, they lie, they’re a littéral cult
Source: i worked there
Could you elaborate please? I’m interested to know.
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/apple-contractors-cork-let-go-siri
That’s known. Siri data is kept for entertainment and human labeling. It’s not like it was hidden, just read the damn privacy policy.
That’s not the problem. With the false positive they were hearing people during everyday interactions. I remember my colleague bothered by the fact they were hearing people having sex, talking about drugs, all the while with personal information written on screen.
Do you want some guy in Apple headquarter hears some random snippet of your life because you pronounced the word “Shiny” and the model messed up?
what bothers me more is them constantly scanning files and storing summaries/metadata for “law enforcement”.
could they be more like google… they already got the pretending they were doing no evil phase and going back on it done down pat.
I disabled that voice activation feature for this exact reason, but yea, what’s shitty is that people had not been clearly informed at all
and yet it will still listen, just not trigger. check wireguard…
did you?
I meant more if you have knowledge about something that wasn’t publicly known. This was 7 years ago and got btfo’d, hence the article about the firings you posted. Also everyone I know turns off Siri because it is useless.
They got btfo’d and then 1 months later they hired the same people through some other contractors to do the exact same thing. I knew them well.
Lol, did you miss the ios 26 update?
Tips Fedora
M’lady
No but for real, that was one of the main reasons it took me so long to test Fedora. I associated fedoras (and Linux in general) with sweaty basement dwellers for many years. Not to mention “red hat” has a different connotation than it did in the 90s. Yeesh. But I’m glad I got over it, Fedora works the best for my needs and Linux isn’t nearly as hard as it’s made out to be. Might try Cachy at some point though.
People still associate Linux to command line without a GUI and lack of compatibility with hardware. But, honestly, besides some issues with drivers on OpenSUSE 15 years ago, I have not had any issues with Linux ever.
For sure, it isn’t even only the corporate or specifically beginner focused distros that are like this these days either. Most distros have gotten with the program of having GUI choices for most things, easy ways to install proprietary drivers if they weren’t allowed tk bundle them already, and even their own ecosystem like an app store.
Some FOSS software does not work as a full replacement for missing professional software, but that’s about all that comes to mind as far as issues.
Do people really like just having rows and rows of random icons on their home screen?
Huh? You don’t have to have icons on your home screen.
you either have them on your home screen or in the app page… which is just as bad UI I might add.
if you can’t remember what the app is named, you spend 3x as long searching for the app in multiple, poorly named categories…
it’s gnome UX all over again…
/me side-eyes macOS Tahoe
Have you ran into issues with Tahoe?
It looks like shit and is demonstrably slower than Sequoia because of all the liquid ass.
MacBooks are just better. Even before apple silicon they had a distinct fit and finish advantage, but now with the M series chips they are just on a completely different level.
Have to agree. I used to write their laptops off as a joke before 2020 due to them having the worst feeling/least reliable keyboard and having overheating issues, however they addressed every issue I had with their laptops when they debuted the M1 models. This seriously made me change my opinion of Apple overall and even the new MacBook Neo is impressive for the price too.
Hardware specs have gone up, prices have come down, competition prices have gone up, competition software has gone way down. The only way I’d recommend a laptop besides a Macbook is if you can find some nice second hand or refurbished laptops, preferably lightly used business class and/or from an auction. And even then, I’d only recommend it if they’re wanting to commit tk Linux and need a laptop specifically, or need a Windows only application. Vendors are really out here selling Windows laptops with 8 GB RAM, horrendous build quality, at damn near 1k. My work provided Windows machine is an i7 (2024 I think, maybe 2023) 32 GB RAM and sits at 16 GB RAM with my basic set of Office applications and browser tabs open. My work provided Mac has an M2 and 8 GB RAM, sits at a little under 7 GB RAM, and feels less laggy with the same programs and tabs open.
Desktops are a different story, though in specific use cases, Mac Studio/Mini/iMac are decent options too.
easy to find the bots in this thread.
ever heard of Linux and Framework? arm is great for phones, doesn’t belong In a laptop…
M1(and successors) are amazing processors. but, being stuck into a ecosystem for one is not worth it. I for one cannot wait for full size RISCV CPU cores… honestly, the market desperately needs a shakeup from all of this “I didn’t have a choice, so I chose the most expensive thing that met my minimum specs” copium.
https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure
Seems to work fine outside the Apple ecosystem.
?? I’m not following. sure you can run arm based CPUs as a mobile device, but performance of large applications or x86 applications is poor.
there is also the addressable memory space issue that exists due to most arm core designs targeting phones… the bus is super limited, despite the architecture technically supporting much much more.
current RiscV cores suffer this same flaw as well.
the reason arm cores have better battery life is they are designed with phones in mind… not a desktop cpu. x86 mobile CPUs are cut down desktop CPUs with tdp restrictions. there is a massive difference as a result.
we are talking completely different design philosophies. it’s like comparing a ebike to a sports car… sure the ebike gets great energy economy when you scale the batteries. it’s half petal powered and has tiny draws on lightweight frame. it’s apples to oranges.
motorcycles would be more apt, but for arm, none really exist outside of obscenely priced workstations.
Did you actually look at the link?
There’s nothing mobile about that computer, it’s cool to not like arm but Apple isn’t the only company selling it.
Lol definitely not a bot. I’ve always been more of an Apple hater due to the ecosystem and business practices, but they’ve turned it around a lot in the 2020s. They’re still a trillion dollar company and not to be trusted, but yeah, they make great laptops.
I main Linux on my desktop and old laptops, like I mentioned. You can say ARM doesn’t belongin laptops but Apple has proven that’s not true. They outperform just about any chip, with battery life efficiency that is not even approachable by any other laptop chips. That’s just the facts. You can spend 3k for a laptop chip that is as good in performance as an M5 (which costs 1k), or you can get a Snapdragon chip that is almost as good as an M5 for efficiency, for over 1k. But not both. That’s where we’re at. Intel especially is asleep at the wheel. At least AMD is making good desktop CPUs still.
I’m also excited for RISC V, I’m considering getting one on an SBC to make a CyberDeck out of. It’s not come as far as ARM yet but it’s promising and we need an open standard.