Comment by seec
8 days ago
The whole window management system is an exercise in contrarianism. They basically chose to do things in the opposite manner of their competitor and mostly against what intuition would dictate for the sole reason of being different.
macOS is very frustrating to use without utility apps that provide the necessary improvements. But they are never as well integrated, cost money or are a hassle to set up.
Apple just wins because they make good-looking, well-built hardware, and sometimes they win on some performance metrics (in the Apple Silicon era, it's mostly about efficiency and single-core speed, which is not as useful as some like to believe).
Apple only "wins" by charging exorbitant prices that idiots are willing to pay to have a digital status symbol. What they have not "won" is market share. They have always been an "also-ran" in market share.
Android (70%) beats iOS (30%). Windows (68%) beats MacOS (13%).
Well, I agree with that if we are talking about the general population. But Apple does have some niches it serves very well that make the prices worth it for some. But of course, this is a very tiny minority of their customers.
For example, they always have been focusing on video editing since the PPC days, starting with the iMac DV. And nowadays, Macs are still quite good for video editing; even when you factor in the price, it's not that bad of a deal. Previously it was about DTP and desktop graphics generally.
But it's always the same playbook; they are first to offer the possibilities of a new usage, but that comes with their high price; over time they lose competitiveness, and they end up switching to something else.
The question is always if the asking price is going to be worth it for whatever you try to accomplish with a computer at the moment. If you are doing work that doesn't require being on the bleeding edge, the answer is probably no.
However, in general, people buy Apple stuff for the status, very often as an ego trip (to prove they are better) and not infrequently out of ignorance/incompetence (it's crazy how much stupid shit Apple fans believe).