Comment by kergonath

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

I am not sure how much I qualify, but here is my use case: it can run Photoshop and MS Office, it has Keynote, it can compile just about any software I use or I develop for my job (mostly Physics and computational Chemistry stuff). It has a sane command line. Honestly, it just works for more than simple tasks. The things for which it does not work is games (but that has nothing to do with the merits of the OS) and yes, customisation.

The alternatives are Windows (which I also use for other tasks), which is a nightmare to deal with and requires tons of faffing about to compile codes, and Linux (which is actually what I use most), which does not have a working Office and is very janky.

That is not even considering the fact that MacBooks are the best laptops by a mile (my Mac is a desktop, so it's not relevant to me).

> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

I do run my Linux box like I want. I spent hours upon ours ricing it up and fine tuning everything I cared about. Stuff still occasionally breaks after a minor update and I regularly have to roll back because of a misbehaving NVIDIA driver (at least once a year). On my Mac, I don't need to tweak every aspect of KDE because the default is fine. I don't need to be able to change pid1 because launchd is fine (but nowadays so is systemd). I don't need to install drivers because everything that does not work out of the box can be tweaked with SteerMouse and Karabiner (honestly, I would kill to have something that works that well on Linux). The couple of utilities I use are much, much better than the Linux alternatives and break much less often. So in effect I don't sacrifice much, and the tradeoff is very good.

I won't even consider Windows. It's as customisable as macOS, but its default behaviour is terrible so here the tradeoff is absolutely not worth it.

I don't like the direction Apple is currently taking, so I will re-evaluate in the future, but for now my Mac is the most pleasant to use of my current computers.

> In Linux you'd solve OP's problem by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS.

And then spending a week to make it work, and then spending hours at unpredictable times when an update breaks something. I know, I already do it on my Linux box. It has some good aspects, but also some bad ones, which is why I use a Mac at home.