These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so.

Two concrete examples: trackpad feels like shit on both Windows and Linux, installing or updating drivers and some apps on Windows constantly switches back to legacy modes to display the installers (with different fonts, no subpixel smoothing etc.). If it's not a deal breaker, it is annoying as hell and something that almost never happens on my Mac.

OP was describing very high-spec hardware which locks up and becomes unresponsive under their normal workload, potentially losing work or wasting their time. That seems like a much more significant issue than inconsistent font display or the feel of the input device.

Your experience must differ, but if I spent $2000+ on a device only to find that was locking up (due to poor memory management in a standard component!) under my standard workload, I would be livid. I would probably return it, and then tell the next 10 people I meet about my poor experience.

That said, I have run across a Windows 7 bug where the font manager would repeatedly fail and leave its cache/log on disk, only to restart and repeat until the hard disk was just about full. Complaints about the poor state of software engineering as a discipline go back to the beginning.

> These issues notwithstanding, the total user experience of owning a Mac laptop is far superior to any Linux or Windows machine I've tried, at least in the past 3 years or so.

That.

I don't love Apple. They're a corporation, so at best our interests temporarily align. Loving them would be absurd. I really really want them to have strong competitors. I'd love to be back on an open source OS full-time, like I was for many years.

Unfortunately, they're so far ahead of the competition, that they screw up, sometimes even in a few ways at the same time, and people come out saying "LOL and Apple fanboys won't switch to Linux even now", and that's true... but it's because I'd be trading a few problems for a few score problems.

I ran Linux on laptops and desktops for about a decade, as my main computers. Ubuntu near the end, Gentoo for about five years, Mandrake really early on, a little time with Fedora somewhere in there, a sprinkling of Debian. I still try it out every year or two! I wish it weren't, but it's still much, much worse, and in the best case slows me down and gets in my way more than a "bad" Apple machine with a "bad" version of an OS X / MacOS, barring actual faulty hardware.

^ This. It's not that I don't want to switch to a different company, it's just everything else is a worse, overall experience. I'm on Windows every week or so, and while it feels much faster than Mac, on the same hardware, there are just too many little things that annoy me. (have tried a few Linux flavours too, not really a contender for my use case)

As a counterpoint, I was a Linux user for ~20 years (eventually with a macOS dev machine on my desk as well).

I got so sick of troubleshooting issues myself, I switched to Windows 7 and have never had to troubleshoot my OS since then. I don't google Windows issues, I don't have crashes, nothing.

It's nice to have a machine that I can just work on and not constantly debug.

(I 100% expect privacy advocates to admonish me for this, but I use hardware I assembled myself and block MS telemetry.)

In a world without MacOS, I'd probably be running Linux on a really beefy Windows machine under virtualization, for work. Desktop Linux is so much more stable and pleasant to use in a VM with Windows or MacOS handling the actual hardware. Still a bit unstable, but not nearly as bad.

libinput with Wayland on a MacBook Pro puts its trackpad handling on par with macOS.

I'm dailying Wayland on Ubuntu, but it feels like there's always a "it'll be really good soon" promise to Wayland.

yea it takes time but eventually open software will be better, just look at how well Blender is doing and even Darktable is way way better then Adobe Lightroom can't understand why anyone uses that anymore while a free alternative that is better is out there.

That's how much we hate Windows and desktop Linux.

Good thing you can afford the kind of expense that the luxury of that hate is costing you then, I guess.

For a professional developer the difference in cost is not that much bigger.

Well, generally speaking Windows and Mac developers are in such demand that hardware is quite a small expense compared to how much they make.

Is the experience very different for Linux developers?

It's very weird to be talking about "windows, mac or linux" developers.

Desktop application development today is maybe about 1-5% of all development, while overwhelming majority of backend development - the largest category - targets Linux.

Percentage of the way to being as good as all desktop operating systems ought, at a minimum, to be:

Windows: 70%

Linux: 20-80% depending on your hardware, what you're doing with it, and how lucky you got with the current kernel & libraries your distro is running.

MacOS: 90%

So when Apple fucks up really bad and MacOS temporarily drops to 70%, no, I still don't switch. Every desktop operating system is shitty, but there are degrees of shitty.

And yes, I use all three pretty regularly.

Crashing while doing your work is not "drops to 70%". That is the problem we were discussing and that is not a minor inconvenience.

Oh look the main speaker for the Mac folk!

Probably because other brands don’t do anything novel to warrant such loyalty. Apples hardware and software stack is undeniably unique which in turn makes it a brand that people will put up with issues because well, it has things other systems don’t.

Because Windows is so much worse. I'm now required to use Windows for a project, and it is a pain to use that system every extra minute.

You might get a better experience running Windows in a VM. Reports are that it is faster that way.

It's because they do so many anti-consumer things to lock their victims in.

Changing brands becomes more of an ordeal than staying.

Tesla. So many people seem to have problems with the cars/lack of quality only to say “still love the car” or “it’s my xxx number Tesla and they’re still doing [problem]”