I got bad news for ya: I just bought a new Yoga a month ago and it is just as bad if not worse.
* Animated ads in the start menu tiles
* I've had to upgraded and restart almost every other day for 4 weeks
* there are ads that keep reapparing in the tiles on update
* there are constant popus reminding me to log in to my windows account (or problems that I can't log in because I HAVEN'T)
* nVidia ads popping up in the lower-right corner
* MSoft ads popping up in the lower-right corner.
* Also, day one: tried installing some LabView software and BSOD (well, the new pretty color blue they use and the high-res warning).
* Starting a new app takes about 15~30 seconds (I believe it is phoning home the way macOS does, not sure).
Win10 now looks and feels like an annoying clickbait website. Once macOS includes ads, it'll be an equally appalling UX.
The only respite I get are logging into AWS compute instances or my Ubuntu and FreeBSD boxes. They can't take away my BASH CLI.
EDIT: I'm getting a lot of "it never happened to me." Yes, I'm sure some of you haven't seen this. I'm jealous.
Meanwhile on my new MacBook PRO 2019:
* Fans randomly turn on with nothing running and `powermetrics` has the fan at 3200 RPM and cpu temp of ... 40C? I literally have to reboot to get them to turn off. I walked into my office one morning and apparently the fans had been running all night with no apps loaded and nothing using considerable power.
* Only some USB-C ports work with my belkin Gigabit adapter. I had to experiment with where-to-plug-what to get it to work. Apparently all USB-C ports on it are NOT the same. Grrr.
* Gigabit adapter never goes to sleep, stays warm when plugged in
* The apple display adpater port + USB-A + power jack periodically drops the screen, and sometimes when I log in I have to open my laptop (I stay docked), wait for the video to mirror, then close my laptop and wait for it to switch to the external monitor.
* Too many Catalina updates this year! But they are faster than my Win10 box.
> Animated ads in the start menu tiles
I wouldn't know, I removed the default tiles and I'm just using stuff I manually pinned.
> I've had to upgraded and restart almost every other day for 4 weeks
My uptime currently is 7 days, last reboot was me wanting to manually upgrade to 20H2. YMMV.
> There are ads that keep reapparing in the tiles on update
Hasn't happened to me.
> there are constant popus reminding me to log in to my windows account
I'm using a local account, I don't get any popup to log in using my Microsoft account.
> nVidia ads popping up in the lower-right corner
How? I've never seen this in my life. I'm running an NVIDIA card.
> MSoft ads popping up in the lower-right corner
I think I got the "you should upgrade to New Edge" popup once, doesn't appear anymore because I did (I wanted to try it out)
> Also, day one: tried installing some LabView software and BSOD
No BSOD yet, but YMMV, drivers can vary in quality.
> Starting a new app takes about 15~30 seconds
I wouldn't know. I've got 64 GB of RAM and a fast NVMe. Nothing loads in more than one second from cold start for me.
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Either brand PC are loaded with additional crap (of course I ran the O&O Shut Up 10 thing just after first installation) or my experience is much nicer than I've read on this forum.
Acer's hardware is inferior in every measurable spec but hasn't failed me yet, and that's frankly all I want from it. It works and it stays out of my way.
Yeah IIRC they can also resize the start menu manually if they don't want any tiles.
Considering that iOS already includes ads, it may not be that long.
- Apple Arcade ad right there at the top of the Settings app: "Apple Arcade 3 Months Available Free >"
- Very often when I just want to listen to the music I purchased, I get a full-screen ad for Apple Music that takes about 20 seconds to load, and cannot be dismissed until it does.
These two things are enough to get me to move to something else, if there was a viable alternative for my workflow. There isn't yet, but I'm keeping an eye out.
There are only really two places to move to: Mac or Win.
If you're nothing but a code jockey, then sure, *nux/bsd can replace your day-to-day, but for the rest of us, we need one of the two, usually with MSOffice. (I work with Google, even they aren't 100% google docs internally!)
Plus a maths programming language. No games though
Sounds like you have Nvidia's "Geforce Experience"(or whatever it's called) installed. Good thing is you probably don't need it.
> * Starting a new app takes about 15~30 seconds (I believe it is phoning home the way macOS does, not sure).
Huh, that is weird. Have you tried turning off this phoning home feature? I think it's called SmartScreen on Windows 10 and you can disable it somewhere. But Microsoft are really the masters of UI dark patterns when it comes to this; they let you disable most of this crap during install but only via near invisible buttons to access these options.
But I agree Windows 10 is insanely frustrating at times. It's what ultimately gave me the last push I needed to switch to Linux.
Are you plugging your power cable into the left side of your mac? I had the same issue, and plugging it into a right-sided port fixed it. It sounds like a joke, but it's real.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/363337/how-to-find...
I have a W10 that I run as a second machine. Updates are annoying (but they don't cross the line of being "terrible" for me).
The ads are something that I haven't noticed. I wonder if that's manufacturer specific. I know I'm running a clean, vanilla install on my setup.
Wow you succinctly captured how using Windows feels for me on a day to day basis vs Mac.
https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/15/apple-explains-addresses-mac-...
This was Apple’s last straw in my book. Yes they’re backtracking, but this wasn’t some extra miscellaneous data someone forgot to remove. Further it took a hail storm of PR (in the dev world) to push change.
Moving to Linux ecosystem, despite loosing the rather smooth Apple ecosystems
System-wide VPNs should still tunnel everything, so it's not as much of a security disaster as it sounded like, but I still don't like that. It's my computer, I should be able to firewall whatever I want.
I always use a "slug"[1] to (re)inforce a VPN.
It's extremely difficult to go around it - certainly not by accident ...
I'm looking into dual-wifi travel routers that will run OpenWRT (and thus give me root) and can do WireGuard at reasonable speeds. I've been meaning to do it for iOS devices anyway (these things phone home constantly, with no way to turn it off) and now it's going to be needed on Apple Silicon macs, too.
Perhaps - and of course that point is well taken.
However, if the hardware device is complicated enough to actually run the VPN then you are back to wondering how it can fail, who can attack it and how things can accidently go around it.
Not so with a slug - it is a dead simple bridge that can't be seen on the network.
If you meant wifi, do you have configs available or hardware you recommend?
I'm still on Mojave on my 2013 MacBook Pro.
The main reason I'd still consider a Mac for my next machine is because there's no other manufacturer that seems to take their trackpads seriously.
Why is there no real competition for Apple's trackpads?
Well you're in for a surprise once they render your Mac completely obsolete in a few years.
Since a few versions, you can actually get the latest safari on the previous OS. So even if safari is the one thing you want you don’t need the update.
> In particular, messages will take up 20%+ of the release content to essentially highlight the ability to put emojis and faces on everything.
Messages in particular probably needs the new OS due to catalyst updates.
I'm on Linux now. It randomly breaks but so does Mac so I might as well have a tiling window manager.
I don't really want to update it, but am going to have to, as it no longer receives security updates from Apple, as you say won't run latest XCode, which also homebrew complains about and says it can't support my OS, and increasingly software I want to install won't cause the OS is too old.
But there are zero features of an OS update i want. I am terrified of what's going to happen when I update.
However, i still far prefer MacOS UX to Windows, myself. I just a quite fine with it on 10.12.
And my 2015 Macbook is still running fine, by the way, have no need of an upgrade for more CPU or RAM or anything like that.
The work laptop is a maxed 15" macbook a year or two old, and it can barley handle video conferences, let alone bazel compilations or debugging in vscode. Keyboard and touchbar are a mess as expected. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
I'm going go straight to a Linux/windows desktop, since I'm working from home anyways. More ram, cpu and a real modern video card is basically what I want, and I won't get that with a mac.
I was in a similar boat. Top spec macPro, all the bells and whistles...and the machine ground to a halt trying to compile anything. Rust was particularly bad, but the worst was trying to compile modules for ONOS, which needed some custom Bazel massaging to begin with. First time in my life the "compiling!" xkcd strip[0] was relevant to my life.
Here's a forum thread for more info: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/upgrading-2013-2014-mac...
I'm seriously considering changing my daily driver to a Linux machine, and getting a mac mini strictly for running iOS builds.
Would need to do some work to kick off a build from the Linux machine which deploys the app to the iOS device, but it should totally be possible with xcodebuild command line tool...
I think the general workflow would be:
1) Develop on the Linux machine in Flutter or React Native. 2) Primary day-to-day / hour-to-hour testing device = Pixel. 3) When ready to build on iOS device, network request is made to the Mac Mini, which then kicks of xcodebuild to deploy the build to the device.
Would need some sort of fast file replication tool. And debugging would be a chore.
Uhg.
Paying thousands of dollars for a gimped developer experience plus the recent decisions around ‘security’ have been dubious to say the least (Apple granting themselves exceptions around filtering mechanisms in new network extensions APIs)
Selected models maybe. In general- no. Not more reliable, not just works.
On Linux I am rarely if ever compelled to reboot unless I upgrade the kernel and want to use specific features like virtualization. There's just no going back once you get used to this.
[1] I know, I know, why use Edge? Fun fact, Netflix doesn't render at higher than 720p on Firefox/Chrome because of DRM issues.
In short:
1. Run this command as an administrator: reg add hklm\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\EdgeUpdate /v Allowsxs /t REG_DWORD /d 1
2. Download and reinstall the new Edge.
Note that Microsoft has said that old Edge will stop getting security updates soon, though I don't know what this actually amounts to as the old Edge's engine remains in Windows for application compatibility even when old Edge is nominally removed.
I'd also suggest that you send feedback to Microsoft about any problems you have with new Edge, using the built-in "Send feedback" tool or Windows' Feedback Hub.
While bricking updates for Windows are rare, the most infamous Windows update bug deleted all user data.
If you want stability, desktop Linux is now the best out of a bad set of options. If you need more software support, run Windows in a VM where it can't destroy anything important.
That being said, Windows updates have a bunch of minor issues, but rarely result in these machine breaking issues that OSX has.
When these "major" releases risk completely breaking my laptop, I see zero incentive to update. I read through the release material and find absolutely nothing compelling. Apple seem stubbornly intent to celebrate these releases as huge step forward. Yet, the feature set is barely noteworthy.
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OSX Release Starter Pack
* "Bold New Design" - we tweaked the colors and made some things round.
* "Refreshed X" or "Powerful X" - we took something and changed it for the sake of marketing
* List of Safari Updates - Just, why? Why is that attached to an OS release?
* A bunch of other apps that are apparently only releasable with a new OS version. In particular, messages will take up 20%+ of the release content to essentially highlight the ability to put emojis and faces on everything.
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I've definitely gone from "I'll buy a mac because it's a mac" to "Maybe my next machine will be Windows. It's cheaper, more reliable, and just works"