Thinking of a mac as a fashionable media consumption device in this day and age seems odd to me. Maybe before the switch to arm, because honestly their intel devices were middling. But between the apple flavor of arm processor and amount of RAM (especially with the M3) these devices are serious work horses.
I used to daily drive a linux machine on a Thinkpad, and the experience just doesn't really compete imo, it would be hard to get me to switch back. It's not that it's a bad experience on a linux machine in the year 2023, but it's not without annoyances that add up over time that I just don't experience on mac.
I think it's even more so now that they've switched to a CPU and proprietary platform architecture that's widely used in media consumption devices --- i.e. smartphones and tablets. IMHO when they were basically PCs with some small differences, they could be considered serious business computers; but now they're just oversized smartphones.
For the record, the Dilbert comic[0] whence "here's a nickel, kid" mentions Unix, not Linux. macOS is a certified Unix.
Accordingly, Macs c/o Unix have been used to perform real work for decades.
Even so Don Norman, Apple Fellow, wrote the forward to the Unix Hater's Handbook. I say this to say there's serious thought behind Apple's OSes _pre-Unix_ and criticism of Unix. (See e.g. John Siracusa's encomia to the spatial Finder).
Thinking of a mac as a fashionable media consumption device in this day and age seems odd to me. Maybe before the switch to arm, because honestly their intel devices were middling. But between the apple flavor of arm processor and amount of RAM (especially with the M3) these devices are serious work horses.
I used to daily drive a linux machine on a Thinkpad, and the experience just doesn't really compete imo, it would be hard to get me to switch back. It's not that it's a bad experience on a linux machine in the year 2023, but it's not without annoyances that add up over time that I just don't experience on mac.
I think it's even more so now that they've switched to a CPU and proprietary platform architecture that's widely used in media consumption devices --- i.e. smartphones and tablets. IMHO when they were basically PCs with some small differences, they could be considered serious business computers; but now they're just oversized smartphones.
For the record, the Dilbert comic[0] whence "here's a nickel, kid" mentions Unix, not Linux. macOS is a certified Unix.
Accordingly, Macs c/o Unix have been used to perform real work for decades.
Even so Don Norman, Apple Fellow, wrote the forward to the Unix Hater's Handbook. I say this to say there's serious thought behind Apple's OSes _pre-Unix_ and criticism of Unix. (See e.g. John Siracusa's encomia to the spatial Finder).
[0] https://i.imgur.com/z96dZ0x.jpg
> macOS is a certified Unix.
So's z/OS, whereas FreeBSD isn't.
Also, there are Linux distros that are certified Unixes: Inspur K-UX, for example.
> Unix Hater's Handbook
Ah, yes, the "our favorite proprietary system was killed by Open Systems and we're Big Mad about it" book.