This is the same point that’s often made about developers. But if it’s not developers and it’s not music producers, what is the large market for Macs that dwarfs everything else? And are they at least getting the products and features they want?

I just tried switching from my MBP to a Surface Laptop, and the bullshit that win 10 makes you deal with is just insane O_O

Alas I took the MBA back and got a refund and grabbed my spare Thinkpad T440 out of the cupboard and put windows 10 on it. The OS is a shell to run Chrome, Excel, Word, Putty, iTunes, kicad, LTspice, WSJTX and I use Fastmail for mail. Literally nothing gets in my way. It just works. And everything like photos and videos are in FILES not weird opaque containers and buggy as crap apps. The CPU is about the same speed, I've got more RAM in this, it's got a FHD display which is good enough and the keyboard is amazing compared to anything Apple had to offer. Plus it cost me literally 1/5th of the cost.

Also comparing OSX to windows, you can actually mostly drive windows from the keyboard without resorting to hand warping shortcut combinations reminiscent of Megadrive Streetfighter cheat codes.

I think after switching back I just had stockholm syndrome.

I've been using Windows 10 more and more over the last 2 years. Its fine. For the first time in a long time I don't feel like Windows is slowing me down, especially now it has sub-system for linux. Its still annoying that processes can lock access to files... but thats small potatoes.

As a long-time Win user, having wrist pain, this is the killer thing for me. Everything about a Mac feels extremely unergonomic to me. Many things are not doable from keyboard at all. AFAIU most of the Mac developers do all stuff with touchpad so they don't care though.

It focuses the menubar, at which point you can navigate the menus by typing/arrow key, Spacebar to focus, and Enter to select.

It helps me avoid a lot of mouse usage.

...come to think of it, I should probably give that a binding on my ErgoDox somewhere.

Only complaint is you have to actually enable Full Keyboard Access from system preferences before you can use the keyboard to do things like select buttons in dialog boxes.

https://gist.github.com/jakub-g/e893ffa9e91d08c6098966080978...

I’ve actually been thinking about writing a keyboard assistant using the accessibility API. In theory it should be easy to drive anything that’s built using UIKit.

Afaik, Windows is perfectly fine for casual users.

Apart from updates needing restarts and windows being inconvenient for programming, I don't see any clear disadvantages of using windows.

[1] I left about a decade ago when I saw where things were headed with iOS-ification of the platform in general. I'm a developer so I feel/felt your pain as a member of one of the groups Apple used to care about. I moved to Linux which I know is no help to you... power user/pro audio features and software on Linux are still lacking.

[0] - https://supercollider.github.io/

[1] - https://puredata.info/

The hardware budget from my employer also helps.

For you perhaps. I've used desktop/laptop linux for nearly 20 years and it works just fine, millions of others do too.

Developer tooling is really damn nice and using the command line is a joy. With proton on steam I can play a lot of the games I like.

But no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get sound to work properly. I'm using a FiiO E10K and a pair of Sennheiser HD650 and no matter how hard I tried I just couldn't get it to sound right. I tried editing whatever configuration file I could find and I still couldn't get it to sound not choppy. Eventually I gave up and went back on windows. Maybe when I'll change my amp I'll give it another try.

I'm glad it's working for you though.

The Mac user experience is great in part because Apple is willing to compromise on backwards compatibility. This allows them to innovate in the user interface (which Microsoft also does) while at the same time keeping it relatively consistent, which is what Microsoft is prevented from doing.

Also, since Apple relies on selling directly to consumers, they really have to prioritise the user experience.

And here's your MP3 player, iTunes...

For real work on the road I use my t410s and ubuntu (although the hinge has now gone, which is a right pain), but most of the time I do real work I'm at home and use my z440 HP workstation (also with ubuntu)

1. https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/install/365d/

There are legitimate reasons to buy macs, but I'd say most people want them because they look nice and they consider them a status symbol.

Hipsters?

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2019/2/7/pro-tool...

Yes. A specialist system integrator can sell you a Windows machine with reliable low-latency audio performance and modern components. A lot of people can make do with a 2013 Mac Pro and don't want to deal with the inconvenience of switching; plenty of others have switched because they simply can't tolerate working on a machine with an Ivy Bridge processor and a maximum of 64GB of RAM.

I have worked in environments where vendors actually give a proper legally binding guarantee that Windows boxes work as expected and they charge accordingly.

When you sell packaged software you'd better make sure it runs with the next version of the OS. All registered Apple software developers have access to beta software, including OSs, for a very long time before launch, precisely to prevent things like this.

The trouble with the beta was it wasn't exactly the same as what shipped which caused delays of several months in most instances.

Edit: I could only find articles from 3rd party sources - NI did not release the statement on their website, but through their newsletter. For example it is mentioned here: https://www.native-instruments.com/forum/threads/critical-co...

Also, I said "from memory [...] last year" but it was 2015! Wow, time flies! :-O

Pro audio users have been loyal Apple customers through thick and thin, but a lot of us have lost faith in Apple's ability or willingness to serve creative professionals. The poor price-to-performance ratio of the trash can Mac Pro was a major source of frustration, especially given the loss of functionality compared to the "cheese grater" Mac Pro; it's really not fit for purpose without spending an extra $1500 on a Sonnet xMac rack kit. The complete lack of hardware updates since 2013 added insult to injury, leading a lot of people to defect to Windows out of sheer desperation. This bug isn't just a nuisance, it strikes at the heart of why musicians continue to pay a serious premium for hardware that often isn't particularly well suited to their needs.

I think Apple are seriously underestimating the risk to their brand of losing creative professionals. The ubiquity of Macs in recording studios and edit suites and on DJ stages said something powerful about the kind of company Apple is and the kind of people who use Macs. It justified the status of Macs as the premium choice for serious creatives. It created an aspirational halo, even if you only really use your computer for web browsing, Google Docs and editing a few photos. Apple are haemorrhaging their most loyal and influential customers, because they don't seem to care about the Mac platform.

That doesn't really matter right now, because they're still selling huge volumes of iPhones at healthy margins, but it could come back to haunt them in a few short years. Chinese smartphone manufacturers are stealing Apple's lunch in emerging markets and making a serious dent in the west; iPhone revenues are declining and it's entirely plausible that the decline could mark the start of a long-term trend. Apple have in effect become a luxury brand that happens to make phones, which has created the existential threat of simply falling out of fashion.

It's also important to understand the context. We spend thousands of dollars on near-field monitors, cables, interfaces, and other kinds of external hardware. If it's a fully rigged up studio, we're talking millions. The "Apple tax" is not really an issue for us, because it's one of the least expensive purchases in our tool chain. I own plugins that are more expensive than the laptop I use to run them.

Edit: You could argue that the people who are really getting burned here are the "prosumer" bedroom producers. That has to be put in quotes, because some of these "bedroom" folks are basically pro-level producers. I'm sure there are lots of people running USB 2.0 interfaces for an in-the-box rig with Ableton or whatever. They are paying the Apple tax, and they deserve way better.

For anyone curious about this statement, allow me to introduce you to Vienna Symphonic Library. It's the industry standard virtual orchestra, it's used by the vast majority of professional composers and a license for the complete library costs $14,332. We're not talking about a desperately price-sensitive market.

https://www.vsl.co.at/en/VI_Series/VI_Super_Package

Those ultra-slim butterfly keyboards didn't invent themselves. Likewise the Touch Bar. Not developing it and sticking with Fn keys would have been a heck of a lot cheaper and easier. All the things 'everyone' complains about took a huge amount of attention and investment to deliver. Even the jet engine Mac Pro took a lot of work to screw up so badly. They just seem to have got it wrong.

Apple is constantly under pressure to innovate, from themselves as much as externally, so they just feel they can't sit still even when where they are is actually the best place to be.

On the other hand I got a 5K iMAC when it came out and ... oh... m... g... is that thing gorgeous to use. But a lot of the very pretty, very well engineered, innovative bits and bobs they've come out with recently have just been wrong.

That's not a connection that should be made in a QA engineer's mind, it's a connection that should be made in an architect or team lead's mind, or better yet, one that should already exist as part of the internal documentation. You don't throw tarballs over the wall at the QA team yelling "you dudes, tell me if this breaks!". You know what's being developed and how, and you design your tests to validate that. Otherwise there are infinitely many tests to run.

As for the connection: the article is low on technical details, and https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/anvufc/psa_2018_macs... suggests there might be several bugs at work here. That being said, if there were a list of top 5 things that could get screwed by date and time change, synchronous playback would definitely make it on that list.

If anything, the output from one of the bug reports ( https://openradar.appspot.com/46918065 ) hints that one of the thing that happens as part of the update is pausing the audio engine. The person who introduced the bug may not have figured it out at the time (which is okay, we all make mistakes), but the whole thing should have gone through code review, at least one round of documentation, and a testing process that's built to spot new problems along with the old ones, based on knowledge about what's new in the code. With the right process in place, there's no way that hits the market without serious testing, not at a pro-oriented company anyway.

Edit: tl;dr: IMHO, that's definitely a testing scenario that should have existed. By spending and commitment, the pro audio industry is probably 1/3rd of the Macbook Pro market, synchronous playback issues routinely creep up in software whenever time and clocking are brought into discussion, and (for at least one of the bugs) the source is not some strange interaction but a deliberate action in the code.

Citation needed - I seriously doubt that the the professional audio market is large enough.

That's hardly the same thing as a bunch of developers installing an aftermarket OS on a midrange laptop. And even then, "you have to install a BIOS update" is just shorthand for Lenovo fixed the problem, right?

I mean, a topped out x1 carbon is pretty much the non-macbook business laptop, so this is a bit unfair.

I know we aren't talking about servers but not-self-serviceable hardware with strict limits is what I usually associate with mid-range, not professional users, not even prosumers.

That laptop costs around 2000€ though. The price itself is enterprise-level indeed.

To be fair though even without S3 sleep it is easy to drop Linux power consumption on the X1C6 to ~2.5-3W with display off and no Linux user worth their salt is afraid of installing a BIOS update which literally adds a 'Linux' mode for sleep after which it's flawless.

The BIOS update even installs without needing Windows now a days - LVFS even.

So, it is even Thinkpad guys who can't write proper bioses these days?

Is there a single laptop out there where you can say the bios is truly flawless?

Board firmware (laptops, desktops, servers) is pretty much always crap.

I love that several distributions of Linux are basically turnkey solutions for most systems (I run Ubuntu on both of my Thinkpads!), but it's not quite fair to compare Lenovo hardware running a 3rd party OS with Apple's vaunted "it just works" hardware/software combination.

Most linux users expect some problems when deciding to go the linux route. When you decide to use linux as your daily driver, you expect to sometimes get your hands dirty. Also, companies like system76 offer laptops created for running linux so you are bound to have a much much better experience out of the box.