It's just a product. Not something to feel betrayed over.

>But I don't like owning things I can't tinker with or fix even a little, both out frugality and a desire to create a little less waste in the world.

Perfectly good reason. Apple is not going to stop trying to make its products just a bit thinner, or otherwise pursue some other overall aesthetic design goal. Repairability absolutely takes a back seat.

>As noted by Business Insider, Apple is increasingly becoming a luxury brand.

Not quite true - that is, they have ALWAYS gone for the higher margin. They flirted with very expensive watches, but that seems to have gone away. They have always gone for the high end though.

It’s not just a product. Apple is so much more. Trying to say it’s just a product is either severely misguided or a lie. Apple is a whole lock-in ecosystem. Good luck getting your music out of iTunes. iMessage is not available on other platforms. Can I pair my Apple Watch to my android? Can another platform project to an Apple TV?

But that’s fine, they’re betraying what they used to stand for (the things that brought us to them in the first place) so it’s not worth it anymore. I’ll never buy an Apple computer again either. And I’m not a casual Apple user. Bought my first Mac (with a black screen in the age before hard drives) when I was 12 (mom paid for half but the rest was money I saved). Worked in the my campus’s first iMac lab. Deployed and maintained macs for the next decade. I was loyal not to a brand but to a product focused company- because they took care of their customers, because their products just worked, because they were fighting for something better than the boring mess that was windows. They appealed to education customers and creative people. The products cost more, but lasted longer and were a joy to use. They made big moves and bold plays that in retrospect were sound. Eliminating the floppy drive, taking a chance on FireWire. But lately they’ve gotten arrogant and disdainful. “Ask me again later” is a slap in the face. How about “No” motherfucker? USBC is a fucking joke. It was a mistake and they simply can’t admit it. Everybody has a handful of dongles on their desk, more complexity for no gain. Charging over usb is fine, but is it really better than MagSafe? (No, no it is not) Where can I buy a usbc keyboard? Maybe from the company going all in on USBC? Nope.

Whatever, I’m done. I went Linux two years ago and never looked back. Tried to go to Android too, but it’s just too terrible. I’ll ditch my iPhone too when I can no longer buy one with a headphone jack.

In conclusion fuck Apple. And to all the apologists saying get over it? No. They’re destroying something that used to be great. I refuse to forget. I’ll take the spirit they have abandoned and I’ll make it mine. I’ll hold them as an example of what not to do, and example of where not to go wrong. And I’ll never forget. Neither should any of you.

> Where can I buy a usbc keyboard? Maybe from the company going all in on USBC? Nope.

Apple doesn't sell USB-C keyboards because Apple doesn't sell wired keyboards at all anymore.

> USBC is a fucking joke. It was a mistake and they simply can’t admit it. Everybody has a handful of dongles on their desk, more complexity for no gain. Charging over usb is fine, but is it really better than MagSafe? (No, no it is not)

There's substantial gains in USB-C. For example: no-fuss 4K monitor hookups that also act as charging connections.

I feel this way a lot myself. I've been a Mac user my entire life and feel like Apple isn't interested in making a machine for me. The designers favor identity brand over functionality (for my purposes anyway).

OTOH, I'm also forced to recognize that my learning and growth had pushed me out of the space of the "computer for the rest of us." But I'm sadly not quite ready to leave.

> my learning and growth had pushed me out of the space of the "computer for the rest of us." But I'm sadly not quite ready to leave.

This implies that apple started as a layman's computer, and their market position has remained stable over the last, say, 15 years.

I'm not sure that's true. While your capabilities and requirements may have grown in that time, I think Apple made a similar and opposite transition, away from a (relatively) low quantity of high power users to a high quantity of low power users.

This movement has left a palpable void in computing. You can get great tech specs anywhere, but apple's hardware and OS usability are something special, and no longer being the target of that blessing is a heavy blow.

This is an idea that I find comes up a lot, but that I don't feel is common knowledge, so if anyone feels differently about it, or can validate it with some data, I'd really like to know.

I have been using Macs for the past 12 years and am nearing the end of my rope. I received the toucbar MBP through work and I hate it due to all the reasons popularized.

But while Mac might take a hostile approach in terms of hardware, Windows takes one with their software. I feel stuck. I also find linux still too janky and don't have the same patience I did as a teenager to go through myriad settings and configuration files just to get things working or looking good.

Linux has been pain-free for me this year. Ubuntu Budgie and Pop!_OS distros feel polished to me now on my desktop. With Budgie I don't do any config at all. I did do about 15 mins of config with Pop and got it looking and set up exactly how I like it. Settled on Pop as my daily driver.

For a laptop, been using a $300 chromebook. With Crostini I get all my linux apps that I use hassle free. I also use Google Docs and Sheets and Bitbucket for my personal stuff - I switch between my laptop and desktop seamlessly. I use my work Citrix if have to work from home (eg. MS Office).

Nothing on my Mac that I miss.

That's cool. I have a small (11") windows laptop that I put Ubuntu on and it took me a bit to have all the display settings to work properly, especially with HiDPI and weird scaling. Nothing ever looked quite right for me.

I had a chromebook for a bit and I really loved it but felt too uneasy with Google having 100% supervision over all of my internet activities.

Yes, dealing with HiDPI is one of the configs I did have to do. I have Pop on another laptop and I kept scaling at 100%, but increased font size by 1.5x via gnome-tweaks. Annoying to have to do it, but it's a one time adjustment and doesn't look frankenstein to me. The 1.5x font adjustment is just one input box via settings tab - not messing with terminal.

I've made peace with the google privacy issues. The convenience made me more pragmatic instead of idealistic, but I hear you.

Linux on a Thinkpad requires about as much configuration to get running nicely (a few hours at most) as you need to dejunkify Windows or install usable dev software on OSX.

Installing dev software on OSX does not take a few hours.

I had to switch my dev environment from Ubuntu to OS X a few months ago, after the company I work for got acquired, and it definitely felt like more hours of work getting this machine into a usable state than I would expect with Ubuntu. Just figuring out how to install Xcode without having to fork over a credit card number took a few hours. That was... frustrating.

I suspect it might seem less burdensome to people who are used to it, just as I imagine getting going on Ubuntu - which feels effortless to me - might be a slower, more confusing process for people who aren't already used to it.

I have heard nothing but horror stories trying to get XCode, or a real Unix-like environment, or Docker, actually running in a way that kinda-sorta emulates production environments

Is HN ever going to stop falling for this type of headline? There's absolutely no new information in this article at all; it's just a summary of the basic history and recent news about Apple, with a couple personal sentences from the author thrown in. This is classic clickbait.

Upvoted for truth, but I don't know if geeks will ever stop falling for technology holy wars of the day. Emacs vs vim, spaces vs tabs, Apple vs [X], etc. One day it will be neuralink brain gel vs Arthur C. Clark's brain caps.

Glorified Tweet.

I'm sort of tired of all these reasons (high upgrade pricing, needless thinness, keyboard reliability, repair hostility), but I am having a bigger problem moving away from MacOS and the tight integrations.

So that's the bigger issue. Windows Subsystem for Linux starts to make a difference, and I just don't have time to fight Linux.

I know people are going to say "Linux is great now! You just have to do these 3 things to get Wayland working with the thingamabob" and at that point, I'd be perfectly happy with a hackintosh if it means I have to fiddle. But I don't have time to fiddle.

Linux requires _literally_ no fiddling on recent Thinkpads.

The whole "having to tweak Linux" is a tired old meme.

Maybe if you’re OK with the defaults on whatever DE the distro ships with. Once you start trying to bend the stock DE to your will or install some other DE/WM setup, you’re likely going to be faced with an endless rabbit hole of tweaking and configuration to get the result you’re seeking. Your only hope for escaping this is finding a DE with defaults you like or forcing yourself to adjust to whatever bits of incongruence that exist between whichever DE and your personal preferences.

This is the problem I’ve faced with Linux at least. I’ve been able to achieve something close-ish to what I want in a Linux desktop setup, but no matter what there’s always a list of papercuts that I can’t really do much about short of writing my own DE (good luck with that with the insanity of X and the bad docs of wayland/libweston/etc).

You are comparing apples with oranges. If you tried to modify the behaviour of the desktop of other OS'es to the extent as you want with Linux, then that would be a fair comparison.

If you want it to look and behaviour just like Windows 7 or Mac OS iDon'tCare, then you might be lucky and find a premade theme that does that work for you.

Same can be said for OSX or Windows, if it is even possible to use a different DE/WM than the default one.

My first Linux distribution was Slackware 2.0, I used a myriad since then, subscribed to Linux Journal during its first decade, eventually as UI/UX developer I re-focused on Windows as main OS, although I still run Ubuntu on my travel netbook.

So I do know my way around Linux distributions.

Tweaking Linux is something I still have to do occasionally, like hacking around video acceleration, handling OpenGL rendering problems, or connecting to wlan routers.

So HiDPI on multiple monitors works every time, in the overwhelming majority of apps too?

(This is usually the scenario where people say "Yes! all you have to do is swap ___ with ___ and tweak this one setting, and it's done!"

But what if you don't have a recent Thinkpad? It was still kind of a pain to get Ubuntu on my 11" Yoga laptop. Hi DPI settings and display scaling never worked quite right and neither did the touch screen.

I’m all in on Linux, and I love my Lenovo X1, but this is not entirely true.

It took me all of two hours to get suspend, the only missing feature out of the box, working for me.

Whereas no amount of effort can decrapify the adware in Windows.

Sure it can. Just buy your PC from Microsoft directly. No crapware, or so I’ve heard.

I have abosutely no problem with Apple devices being thinner, and near impossible to repair. As long as, say the average Apple computer requiring repair is less than 0.1% per year. On a 100M Mac user scale, that is 100,000 repair per year. Apple could easily give them free replacement or fix it for them for free. That would be perfect.

But in reality the failure rate of Apple is only half of HP and Dell. Initial Cost 40%+, and repair cost 100% more. And for business / professional users, HP and Dell make same day replacement to fixing. Apple? Try that with Genius Bar.

Whatever it is, I think Apple is on the verge with consumer confidence collapse. Next 2 year will be crucial.

I thought we'd abandoned the practice of writing articles that start by bragging about the author's "Apple fanboy" cred, followed by comparing Apple to a religion. I can't possibly take any article seriously that still does that.

>Anyone have recommendations for a good PC?

A good place to mention https://puri.sm. Repairability is one of their selling points, along with the openness.

1399? For a base ssd of 120? 4 gb of ram? The only people who will buy this already have the bodies and guts of other laptops scattered around their workshop cause they already fiddle. Don’t get me wrong, options and alternatives are always nice, but presented as a solid alternative to a Mac... nope.

A tiny company cannot make a cheap quality product in small quantities. If you feel repairability and freedom are important, it is worth it though.

When I read "repairability and freedom" and yet the site wants to upcharge me $70 to go from 1x4GB to 1x8GB RAM, I get kind of dubious.

The writer addresses hardware only, not discussing the number of software nuisances that have been added. Using Mavericks on an ADSL connection was next to impossible because it insisted on downloading 300MB of trivia right out of the box - an update for some plaything like Garageband. Finally tamed the "phone home" tendencies with Little Snitch.

From my POV the apotheosis of OSX was 10.6.8, so my daily driver on my 2013 retina MBP (Mojave) is... SLS 10.6.8, virtualized in Fusion. When this machine dies, that's it, no more Apple anything.

The last computer I ever upgraded was a machine I built in 1997. Meanwhile my Macs are lasting 7-8 years. I haven't used an MBP with the Touch Bar, so I can't speak to that (the two MBPs I have currently are a 2012 and 2015 model). As other commenters have stated I'm certainly not switching to Windows. I love Linux on servers but I'm not thrilled with running Linux on a laptop. So it's Apple. For me they're still the best value for the money.

I love my Lenovo X1. I tried a hacked chromebook and the Dell xps13 first. (Gave up on Apple two years ago) No driver issues at all these days. The X1 is great. The XPS13 has a weird coil whine issue. Biggest tweaks have been to window behavior with compiz. Takes five minutes to disable window snap and sticky edges.

I just run Ubuntu because it’s so common, but I’ve tried a handful of other distros. Some are quite nice. I do miss Omnigraffle though, and my Apple purchased music is unplayable. I should sue them and set legal precedent forcing them to unlock on request.

I have Windows computers built 10-15 years ago that can still play modern games at respectable frame rates.

My laptops from college and law school both still work, and the one from law school (an HP laptop that was in many ways a rough precursor to MS' Surface line) still has 70% of its original battery life!

A key point in why I despite Apple products: the first year of law school, roughly 90% of the students used Apple laptops. By the start of the second year, 50% of the students used Apple laptops. By the end of law school, only a handful of students still used Apple laptops; all of them were the type that babied their computers. The problem is that Apple laptops simply weren't built to survive the rigors of school, and those laptops were stronger than the ones Apple sells today.

So, based on the experience of roughly 300 students at my law school, I say that Apple is only the best value for the money if someone else is paying for it and the AppleCare service plan. If it's your own money, Apple is the worst value.

Interesting. That hasn't been my experience at all. I don't know how many times my 2015 MBP has been in my backpack when it's fallen off a table or whatever. My MBP isn't in any kind of enclosure or anything and my backpack is one of those you get during registration at a conference. That is to say it's nothing special and in fact is rather cheap. Meanwhile my MBP keeps chugging along without even a scratch. It's definitely not being babied - I can tell you that! :)

Apple's high base prices and obscene upgrade prices finally crossed some hard to describe psychological barrier where I'm concerned. Bye, Apple. :(

I'm old enough to see Apple go from selling computers you had to put together yourself in your garage, to selling the most hacker/tinkerer-hostile products ever made.

I think the straw for me was the fact that I had to factory reset my entire MacBook down to the "ROM" just to get the left side of my keyboard to work.

For anyone looking to dump Apple, check out https://elementary.io for an operating system!

Elementary doesn’t allow you to store things on the desktop. This seems like a silly place to take a stand.

All those saying they won’t buy another Mac will silently regret this once their new windows machine is infected with malware, slows down, or otherwise suffers from all of its ailments. Unless they are already proficient in Linux, one of those will drive them nuts with the relatively limited software offerings.

The author doesn’t actually say which of the possible upgrades he personally did, and how he benefited from it, and thus how he has suffered since the ability to custom upgrade components was taken away. I think he just likes the idea. He won’t like the reality of the hassle of a PC, and I hope he writes a follow-up article when he “returns” to Apple. And loads of people I know who have moved _from_ a PC to a Mac actually have benefited, without the need to then upgrade the already-powerful (Apple) computer they now own.

Anyway, the need to upgrade was driven by software that was ahead of the curve. This was good, people were making and improving Mac software! And they still are, without the correspending need to upgrade RAM to make it run. It just runs. I started with a PowerBook 170 (maybe it was 190?), and worked my way up through models, upgrading ram or HD as needed. I worked with people using windows... holy moly, their misery was non-stop. And it’s still that way!

I've been a windows user since 3.1 on a 486 and i've abused the hardware and software installing all kinds of dubious devices and software and I don't recall having a unrecoverable or unrepairable problem because i could always open my computers and replace whatever part was damaged or backup-restore in case of software problems, now having to replace a laotop for a dirty keyboard seems outrageous to me, but I don't blame Apple, it's like going hiking with a pair of Armani shoes and complaining because they're uncomfortable and break easily.

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