> * MBP batteries are laughable in the first place and they’re basically portable desktops that need to stay plugged in all the time

Probably because you’re using so many electron apps. This is not the case in lab testing by MacWorld, etc.

More likely the 7 years straight of full time development I've done on this laptop, constantly running compilers and image editors and browsers. I could complain about those too but in the end, laptop batteries have to support the software that exists, not the software in a hypothetical ideal world.

My Mac (just over three years old) reliably gives me 7+ hours off a full charge if I’m not constantly compiling anything; just reading mail and Hacker News can easily give 10+ hours. I very actively ensure that Electron is never running on my Mac.

I'll second this opinion - when I don't have Chrome running, my 2015 MBP runs forever.

If the thing is 7 (!) years old it’s no wonder the battery is done. That is not an issue with Mac batteries.

Disagree on all points...

"Counting seconds" may mean little to you but by proxy you can look at conversion statistics for web stores vs response time and see a pretty clear correlation

VSCode's 'performance' is the result of an obscene amount of tuning the base framework, far more than most applications would need. Most other Electron apps do not see anywhere near this level of optimization (and they desperately need it).

MBP batteries on a new machine are respectable. Like all li-ion batteries they decay with use

Mac OS apps behave very consistently when they are native. True, Apple's user interface guidelines allow for pretty wide latitude in some areas (like skeumorphism) but all the basic OS/interaction contracts are intact. One can expect menus to behave the same way, file open/save dialogs to behave the same way, and so on.

First of all Apple does not follow its HIG in many ways. But even aside from that, the HIG itself changes every few years, sometimes drastically such as the iOS 7 departure. And it takes many apps time to catch up. One example is Apple's own new Mac App Store which doesn't even allow selecting or copying text in app descriptions last I checked.

Apple has definitely been shitting the bed on UI in the past few macOS releases.

The Mac App Store is a fairly well known atrocity which might as well be a Catalyst app for how bad and out-of-place it is.

The ability to copy text from UI labels was never part of the contract. Generally when that happens it was because the label control was some kind of textbox with most of the visual features disbled

From Mac OS X 10.0, labels were simply text boxes with editable set to false, both being NSTextField, and when it seemed reasonable that the user might want to copy it, you used Interface Builder to mark it as selectable.

I mean VSCode is the best Electron app ever made and it still kind of sucks. The median is miles underground.

Consistency is a sliding scale but Electron is a whole new (lower) level. Extremely basic interactions like "the menu bar highlights to acknowledge key equivalents" are missing.