Comment by sho_hn
21 hours ago
> Even among tech people, they have good will
Wait, do they?
I mostly remember:
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
You forgot things like shipping decades-old free software with their OS because Apple are so implacably opposed to their users having freedom to use, examine, modify and share that software.
Funnily I just yesterday realized that my macOS-bundled bash version is (was) from 2007 because $BASH_ALIASES (introduced in bash 4) didn't work.
SIP is the obvious contra, though.
If that's what you "mostly" remember, your memory is awfully selective. It's totally fine for you to have a bias, but you're overlooking decades of massively successful products and services.
Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
I don’t get your comment, do you mean superiority in what? Are you comparing operating systems or hardware? The combined experience?
If you asked me 2 years ago I would say something different about Linux than I would said today, because I’m running a different distribution with a different desktop environment and that changed my experience completely, even though I’m running on basically the same hardware.
I run Linux in Apple hardware too, how does that rank in your comparison?
Off-topic: What were you running before and what are you running now? And are we talking about laptop use?
Of course it does in the US tech bubble, if you talk to people who haven't been using Macs for 30 years you might hear a different story. While Apple makes good hardware they also have plenty of blunders, especially in recent years, much like Microsoft in its domain really. Both are coasting on their past successes and familiarity. I get it, many of my coworkers watch their announcement streams like they're video game announcements. From my standpoint they haven't put out anything exciting since the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I don't have the money for toys that cost thousands of dollars apiece like the Mac Studios or their VR headset, so maybe I'm missing out.
The Mac Mini has been exciting for me. A great low cost low energy consumption desktop that does what it is supposed to do.
The VR headset was such a flop that I think it might paradoxically have not hurt their reputation. Like nobody is saying “wow, this Apple vision thing really sucks,” because nobody has seen one.
> but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform
And probably fewer still consider switching to the alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the least bad option.
You have to pay me to use Apple, Microsoft, and Google products. None of those organizations are good.
Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on their main products that prevents improving device security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.
Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar" screen and the navigation and content screen both show "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same time.
I understand developing for those platforms makes money or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop products that support those companies, I will never pay with my personal income to support those organizations.
So you don't use a smartphone?
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For hardware only
Eh, macOS is still the UNIX with the most commercial software available. 26 feels like a misstep*, of course, but I’ll take it over a Windows environment any day.
* Xcode 26 is kinda neat, though
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No.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
When someone makes a SteamOS level "just works" distro for desktop / gaming I'll probably happily switch
for X_86 family for sure, but the experience on other chip set such as Apple Silicon (maybe the arms) for desktop usage are quite rough around the edges.
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> > Wait, do they?
The echo chamber is still reverberating. People say that MacOS is good because other people have told them so. The people claiming that is better don't have an earnest effort outside of the ecosystem to support their claims. I was forced to use MacOS at work up until a little over 1.5 years ago, I have perspective on both, and it is categorically incompetent. It doesn't hold a candle to dev on Linux.
As for Windows? Windows 7/11 are probably still better than MacOS (as you implied with your comment about neglect), but it's probably as bad or slightly better than Win 11.
I’ve used Windows at work for years, my personal/gaming machine is Linux (mint), my personal/development machine is MacOS.
They’re all perfectly viable options with strengths and weaknesses. None of them are especially great. I’m partial to MacOS, personally.
It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.
> It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.
This is so entirely true.
I've installed so many different Linux distributions (and multiple Windows versions) on my personal laptop. Currently noodling around with NixOS.
I've never been tempted by a non-macOS laptop for work.
Whatever faults macOS has, it is very good at staying out of my way for getting work done, and all the small ancillary bits (eg webcam and audio support for chatting) have worked flawlessly for me for two decades. I cannot say the same about either Windows or Linux.
In my business (partly home studio support), it's hard to support MacOS for new-ish users.
If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.
If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.
For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
I’m a producer since Cool Edit Pro and Fruity Loops. I’ve used Windows and Macs for audio and video production extensively over the last two decades. I have no idea what you’re on about.
I gave four specific examples that frequently slow me down when helping people who are new to studio stuff. You ignored my examples, and pointed out you have decades of experience. Why do you start by pointing out you're not the user I'm talking about and ignore the examples?
Apple is certainly fumbling in recent years, and it's clearly behind in some games (Siri, AI in general, iPhones turning into a yearly snooze-fest). But of all the FAANG, I'd say it's the only one I trust, simply because they're not trying to sell my data and have a consistent stance on security.
Tim Cook giving Trump a gold-plated statue in exchange for tariff preferences seems like a very bad sign.
Why? It was a relatively cheap way to dodge the capricious whims of a madman who is fortunately easy to distract with shiny objects.
It certainly is. It's not exclusive to Apple, however - _all_ the big tech (and non-tech) companies offered tribute, in one form or another. Despite it being illegal, it seems to be the new government practice.
Whether that'll lead to the government requiring Apple to break their encryption, it remains to be seen. I imagine Apple has a bit of an edge here anyway, since iCloud is allegedly e2e encrypted?
Unless Cook starts letting ICE have free roam of Apple's campus, I have trouble faulting him or any business owner for trying to avert the mad king's gaze.
He didn't give him a statue, he gave him a gold bar. A literal gold bar. With a plaque.
It seems like they got the memo. Pay Trump personally or have your business destroyed.
Im not really sure how that benefits me as a US citizen but that is who the majority of the population seems to want and once the rules are set you follow or face made up tariffs that rip you apart. Right.
Why? Regardless of your view of Trump, would you not expect mr. Cook to play the game? His only job is literally and figuratively to navigate hell or high waters to deliver value to the shareholders.
> because they're not trying to sell my data
Are you sure?
They use it internally for marketing and sales.
They also use it for their growing ad platform.
Can't let people find your app for free. You need to pay to defend your trademark and lead in a given app category.
Plus they've severed the customer relationship and inserted themselves as Mafia middlemen. They'll sell that to companies too.
Apple is behind in AI because they've prioritized keeping private data on your device, rather than in the cloud, but today's best (or even good) inference models still require cloud-scale compute, i.e. they don't fit on a phone.
I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
> A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
Mac OS 8 was new in 1997 and was pretty innovative for user-facing features, if not the underlying operating system. It blew Windows 98 out of the water as far as that went.
I was around at the time.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
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If all you did was look at it, sure. OS 8 was a mess internally with an archaic and badly designed kernel. Windows 98 was much better at multitasking, system recovery, process isolation, etc. And that's saying a lot for the BSOD-ridden mess that that was. Then you had NT, which made both look like children's toys.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
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MacOS 8 was not innovative by 1997 standards. I had it running on my PowerMac 6100/60. It was crash prone and Netscape could easily crash the entire OS, cooperative multitasking, you as an end user still had to manually allocate how much memory an app could have.
None of these were issues on Windows 98.
We have different ideas of what qualifies as tech people if we're talking about Liquid Glass, Siri, and Vision Pro
IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"
They aren’t doing a great job exactly, but what is there to recommend to somebody who doesn’t want to use the command line? SteamOS, maybe, haha.
> I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
Maybe you're speaking for yourself? I absolutely love my Macbook and the M-series are the best devices I've ever owned.
> - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
Really? I haven't noticed.
The rocky start for apple intelligence is what excites me
....and their tools are very flash, bright colours and buttons...and they mostly work
"Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple is still good, the developer experience is woeful
It's also amazing that they convinced developers that running a non-standard CPU instruction set through a laundered Rosetta layer was somehow battery or compute friendly lb for lb when an AMD processor (or even Intel) is plenty efficient and cool.
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
Delusional take. Rosetta is for maintaining compatibility during the transition. Efficiency is fine with Rosetta. But it doesn’t matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done. Not true, unfortunately, for Windows.
Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Pile onto that the fact that a lot of us are in the cloud, and the cloud has ARM processors, and they're generally priced as competetive, especially with m7i and m7a. So it's not the worst thing in the world to be using arm64 architecture on your dev machine.
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What is the efficiency loss specifically? Do you even know, or are you just asserting it?
>it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done
'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but, putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when it's already done. You're essentially ceding "Yes, I've been wrong and this has been a fool's errand for the past x years until right this moment as the project is done". It's not done and it'd a weak argument.
>Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Specifically what are the numbers? Because I have performance/tdp numbers and the M-series performs well but it isn't a categorical difference. In fact, that's no difference, it performs okay but AMD is at the top of the heap currently. Sad.
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