I needed to buy a Mac this year. I rarely work out of my home office these days, so after reading up on people's negative experiences with the new MacBooks, I've settled on a Mac Mini.

Half a year later, and it's... okay. It gets the job done. But then so does my old trusty Asus UX32LN (i7-4500, 8 GB RAM), running Ubuntu with all the hardware working out of the box. I've had more hardware glitches with the Mini so far than I'd had with the UX32LN.

Software-wise, I don't feel much difference. I pretty much live in Emacs and the browser, and both work everywhere. I like the polished feel of macOS (although I've had a brief encountered with it in the Snow Leopard days and it felt _more_ polished back then), but I do miss the customizability of Linux (the macOS maximize/fullscreen experience is subpar).

I've been considering a Mac Mini as an alternative to a laptop.. would you mind expanding on the hardware glitches you've been encountering? Is it any faster than a laptop or about the same?

I think that somewhere between 2006-2013 was something of a quality age for MacBooks.

The issues that came, like the keyboard, or lack of repair DIY ability coincided with the advent of the iPhone. The question at the moment is whether 2019 and 2020 is a quality age for MacBooks or not, and I don't know the answer to that, but it does appear like 2012 MacBooks are more resilient than 2019 ones.

I think a Frankenstein Dell XPS / MacBook is round about time now from some company X.

I was a long-term Mac user (>10 years) and switched do Windows and Linux. I will „never“ go back to a Mac.

One of the reasons was that I couldn‘t make Mail.app working with Exchange/Microsoft 365 (especially shared mailboxes) and the other that Docker is so slow (volumes with many files are unusable). It‘s sad to not have a single OS for everything. I now need Windows to write e-mail and Linux to do my work.

I would have kept a Mac and installed Linux in dual-boot but I need something that „just works“ because I need to do work sometime and I wasn‘t sure enough that it will work smooth.

I used to use my personal mbp for work, since I found windows extremely annoying for operations work (it's only getting slightly better with alacritty and windows terminal...) and my client wouldn't provide me a mac. Almost two years ago I tried installing Arch linux on the laptop they provided which was gathering dust, and I was surprised that almost everything worked perfectly out of the box (except for the fingerprint reader).

They're using Office 365 too, so I tried using it in the browser (Firefox) and I loved it so much that I can't use the local outlook client anymore. It just feels sluggish, and I hate that I have to let go of the slider when scrolling to see the message list update. I don't think shared mailboxes are handled very well, though.

I agree, being grown up with Linux/Mac and then starting to use Windows is like „why can‘t i do that through a terminal“ all the time.

Online Office 365 is not a workable solution, because I‘m a contractor and need to use up to 3 exchange accounts within a single day. And that‘s a lot of logout-login if done in the browser. Chrome (profiles) is not an option for me.

I suggest you to use Multi-Account Containers addon on Firefox.

Yes and no. I bought a 2018 MBP to replace my 2016 MBP. After about a year I sold it (another nice feature of Apple stuff is that you can actually sell it for reasonable prices in my country), and I’m now back to using my 2016 MBP.

So it’s not just that everything else is worse, which I agree with, it’s also that Apple is getting worse.

I do not really want to bash MacBook here as Apple does what it wants and that it how it should be. The other manufacturers do the same.

I have no real problems with my Windows and Linux setups though. I had a loaner MBP and Mac Mini for about a year for testing purposes and frankly I did not see a single thing (OS/hardware) that would cause me to switch. So your statement about "the least amount of problems" is likely what you feel personally and does not really translate to what somebody else would fine.

Even if MacBooks have the least amount of problems, there is almost nothing you can do, when problems occur, unless you have extended warranty. My first MacBook died (one year old) and I couldn't even take out the SSD to back up any data.

> I replaced it for free and can replace again for few more years so it's not even a problem.

Keyboard replacement is only free for up to three times.