The ones that don’t complain have low standards. When I switched, although OSX was pretty solid, it was trading frequently spinning beachballs for the first consistently responsive computer I’d ever used. I had come to regard macOS sluggishness as normal, as do most Mac users, because they haven’t experienced anything better.

> The ones that don’t complain have low standards.

> they haven’t experienced anything better.

I don't want to gratify this pointless flame any more than to say that I have used all of Windows (XP, Vista, 8, 8.1, 10), Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and macOS as my daily driver at one point or another, and I currently use macOS because I have yet to experience anything better. There is a simple explanation for your problems here: something is wrong with your system (or you are overtaxing it) if it beachballs constantly. This is not typical macOS behavior, especially not since they switched to SSDs. I actually haven’t seen a beachball in years.

I don't disagree with you, but you didn't exactly refute the point of 'low standards' just by using multiple OSes ;)

My standards are high enough that I choose to use macOS and not Linux or Windows. I make no other claims about them.

More like "specific enough" instead of "high enough". Use Apple all you want but don't lie to yourself by saying Windows isn't a better, more powerful, more stable operating system.

It just isn't as polished, and even that's debatable.

I switched to a 13" M1 after having a Dell XPS 15 as my daily driver. I had high standards and Apple blew them out of the water. I see some beach ball on occasion, but I slam the machine hard. (8gb ram). It has been more reliable than the XPS 15.

Better than a Dell XPS 15 is no standard at all. The Dell XPS 15 is an utterly terrible laptop that breaks if you close the lid and put it in your bag when you get up from your seat. It's a portable desktop falsely advertised as a laptop due to its many flaws. If the best that can be said for apple is better than Dell XPS 15, that is a really, really damning review. I hope it's vastly better than that for you.

> Better than a Dell XPS 15 is no standard at all.

so what is the laptop that would meet this standard for which you're making a judgement?

So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).

Not OP, but I have to chime in here- Dell's XPS line somehow got a reputation that it absolutely did not deserve as a good laptop to run linux on (or a good laptop at all).

I've been perfectly happy with a surface book 2, and various Lenovo and HP laptops. They each have better and worse product lines. Currently rocking an HP elitebook for personal use and a MB Pro for work.

The hardware quality is more or less the same on both. With the pro, you get a moderately better touchpad, a bit thinner and metal chassis. On the other hand, crap keyboard and the abomination that is the touch bar, and no legacy ports.

Personally, I don't think I would buy Apple for myself ever again, but that's just me.

> Dell's XPS line somehow got a reputation that it absolutely did not deserve as a good laptop to run linux on

This is where it started... https://www.engadget.com/2009-05-24-dell-now-offering-studio...

It got the reputation because it is well deserved. The clickpad is far superior than macs and the software support is great

No one will ever convince me that a laptop with a web cam whose position is limited to looking straight up your nose is quality.

I primarily navigate by keyboard, so the difference between an acceptable and amazing trackpad is pretty minimal for my preferences. On the other hand, port wonkiness, temperamental wifi, okay keys, mediocre battery, driver issues and an utterly useless webcam convinced me to ditch the XPS the first chance I got. It's amazing I used it nearly 18 months.

The fact that we even have to debate about which laptop is good for Linux or not makes me not want to bother. I switched to Mac 12 years ago, and I never had to bother thinking about choosing hardware since. It just works.

>So far, apple hardware has been superior to any other manufacturer, even with their warts, and their anti-consumer practises (of not having replaceable batteries, etc).

Milage may vary with other manufacturers, it doesn't look like you would change to another manufacturer. Which is ok.

Check business notebooks, from HP or Lenovo. (I forgot one particular Dell series.)

Ok... so what's the laptop that can compete with the new 14 and 16 Macbook Pros then and doesn't have some stupid flaw? The issue with waking up in bags seems to be caused by Modern Standby which is on most new Windows laptops?

I would go with a Lenovo or HP machine before a Dell. Even if they all have the sleep issue (I don't know if that's the case), both Lenovo and HP have better build quality.

I've had multiple Asus laptops (UX305, UX330 and most recently S435UA) and all of them ran Fedora flawlessly out of the box. Granted, none of them had Nvidia GPUs which is the usual pain point of desktop Linux.

I was going to say just disable modern standby because that was totally a thing until spring 2020 when the registry key to disable it was removed.

Microsoft is basically a toy OS run by incompetents without reasonable QA unfit to be anything but a launcher for stream.

HP Z-book, some Lenovo Thinkpads and some consumer Lenovo and HP notebooks.

I have had the opposite experience. Switched from a MB Pro that kept getting progressively worse over the course of a year (keys giving, overheating, lock ups) requiring rather annoying applecare interactions to an XPS 15. Granted it is not quite as pretty look at, but blows the mbpro out of the water performance and stability wise.

That doesn't mean linux is any better. I built a brand new ryzen x5800 machine late last year, running linux mint. When I first built it, the computer has had duplicate unremovable mouse cursors appearing on the screen. And my trackpad sometimes randomly became unresponsive (or one time, the up and down directions flipped!). And neither suspending nor hybernating worked - the machine wouldn't come back up.

All these problems have since gone away thanks to software updates and (importantly) a BIOS update. It turned out my USB controller wasn't being configured correctly by the motherboard. If I didn't happen to check for BIOS updates, I'd still have lots of problems.

And that was still a better experience than the HP laptop I bought a couple of years ago. That laptop had so much HP crap preinstalled that it sat on 30% CPU usage at all times out of the box. The biggest offender was some HP process doing microphone noise reduction. It ran all the time regardless of whether or not the microphone was being used - and utterly demolished the machine's battery life.

Apple is far from perfect, but they have a better reputation than most vendors for a reason. And their technical support is are excellent. I've had thousands of dollars of free hardware repairs & replacements over the years when things have broken in my apple machines. I wish they didn't break so much; and I wish they prioritised fixing software bugs over adding features internally. (APFS aside, I would trade the last 5 years of macOS features for better stability and performance in a heartbeat.) But there's a reason they're so well liked on HN. They're still pretty excellent in comparison to the competition.

Tell that to my tech lead who spent more than 8k buying and repairing his macbook due to constant motherboard issues. I love macs but don't dare to try them due to soooo many people in my circles seem to have very frequent HW issues with them. It seems to be either in the shop being repaired or having issues with connecting bluetooth stuff. I'm used to Thinkpad reliability so not looking forward to trade that up for some pretty pixels. My lenovo laptops had 0 issues in the past ten years. Zero. But now I'm web development and I need a mac for Safari to test locally.

I manage a fleet of macs. I have not seen any issues like that. I'd ask what your friends are doing to their computers to be seeing such a disproportionate amount of hardware issues.

How well does macOS run on your home-built Ryzen machine?

Huh? What point are you trying to make? I don't care how well macOS runs on my machine. I care how well any given computer gets out of the way and lets me get my work done. Today that means intellij, the rust compiler, firefox and nodejs. I want to spend my day working. Not futzing around with HP bloatware. Not rebooting due to apple memory leaks. And not guessing why my keyboard needs to be reconnected.

In your story, you built a machine, and Linux didn’t work well on it at first. Later, it worked fine. Meanwhile, macOS never did and probably never will run on it. And you introduce this story as an illustration of how “Linux isn’t any better.” So, to borrow your words: Huh? What point are you trying to make?

In my story linux didn't work well at first. Then with some time and work, it worked fine. An HP windows laptop didn't work well at first - but after I spent some time removing the HP bloatware, it worked "fine". This article says that mac laptops aren't working well because of memory leaks. But in a few months Apple will probably fix their software bugs and they'll work fine too.

You said:

> The [mac users] that don’t complain have low standards

I agree with you. I'd go even further and say most users have low standards, because the out-of-the-box experience with most modern computers is pretty bad. Apple users should absolutely complain more when the out-of-the-box experience with their computer isn't perfect. We all should.

Apple customers keep buying apple computers despite their issues not because we have low standards. We do it because the alternatives are even worse.

“most users have low standards”

I think you’re probably right about this. It’s like we’ve been trained to have low expectations.

As an avid linux user I can tell you. Linux users aren't "trained" to have low expectations. They are trained to be masochists that enjoy pain. The raw amount of configuration, fixes and setup work that has to go into making some linux distros work is astronomical.

If nonlinux users are trained to have low expectations, Linux users are trained to rape themselves constantly.

I see your point of view a lot but I don't think configuring a system is that hard and I think it's preferable, compared to have tons of complexity preconfigured without your knowledge.

Here's my experience with Arch Linux: 1) You install what you need to install 2) You read the doc and configure to your liking, learning what the system can and cannot do and how it works with everything else 3) Things generally work as documented and you go your merry way 4) When something break or doesn't work, you have the knowledge or a general idea of what to fix

Compared to proprietary systems where there is no documentation and little configuration, when things break or misbehave you're essentially screwed. Will you wait for an official fix or look online for reverse engineers? You bought a black box and you can't just open it and fix it.

I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.

>I'd rather spend a day learning about my system during the installation and having it work for years, instead of buying yet another black box I can't open.

Learning linux doesn't take a day. Second off those black boxes statistically are more reliable than linux EVEN when you account for all the things you talked about.

The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a business advantage and unfairly strong arms hardware manufacturers to make their stuff work with windows. This unfair advantage makes the windows user experience better and more reliable than GNU linux whos' developers constantly have to play catch up with hardware.

It's is sad isn't it?

In the last 20 years PC hardware has become ridiculously faster - and yet the user experience seems to have changed little.

I saw an article ages ago whereby Microsoft apparently had a dependencies approval gateway. If you made any change based on Windows you had to remove/reduce your dependencies or make a good case for not doing so.

I was hoping that would catch on.

The point he's trying to make is linux on a Ryzen isn't as good as MacOS on an M1. The user experience is inferior. That is his point and his point is fact. Hope you understand now.

user experience is inferior? how so? what nonsense, i have heard countless stories on dumb things Apple forces on its users while on Linux you can just use Vulkan... Imagine if your app can't contact Apple servers they don't launch or take minutes to open...and when they do work they are recording information... why on earth do people still use closed source software. Now we have to deal with Safari crap... like we used to deal with IE5, having to have workarounds for browser standards Apple refuses to follow or implement.

Don't waste your breath, let them be 'happy' in their little cult. I think Apple users are often mad because subconsciously they know they are taken a fool.

It's not a cult. I use all three operating systems and I'm highly proficient using linux. My distro of choice is Manjaro and NixOS and I have a lot of experience with debian and ubuntu as well.

Each operating system has benefits and downsides. For user experience linux is definitively the worst. Definitively. The differences are so large that it's almost comical how someone on this planet can't see the difference. If you can't see this then you are the one that is part of a cult.

Feels super ironic you choose to describe Apple users as a "cult" in a reply to a guy that sneaks his "Safari is the new IE5" in every response... ;)

> user experience is inferior? how so?

I use linux every day for work and:

- Hidpi support is spotty (its getting better but still a bit spotty)

- Smooth scrolling in applications is inconsistent at best

- The keyboard shortcuts for moving the text cursor around are inconsistent between programs

- Hardware support is much more of a crap shoot. Linux has a harder job than macos in trying to support every combination of janky hardware out there. But as a user, I don't really care. I just know that if I buy a mac, the OS will work perfectly with the hardware on offer. That isn't true on linux.

- Lots of useful software isn't available on linux. Eg, I love Monodraw, but thats macos only.

- App distribution on Linux is a mess. Apt? RPM? Snap? Flatpack? Etc etc. I have 2 copies of discord installed for some reason, and I have no idea what the difference is between them.

Etcetera..

Linux gives you the choice and freedom to spend an unlimited number of hours customizing everything. With linux I'm in complete control and I love that. On macos, things usually just work out of the box. I love that too.

No OS is perfect. There's tradeoffs with everything. If you don't understand other people's preferences, that doesn't make you right. It makes you ignorant.

Linux can't even run on the M1.

He's obviously comparing a linux PC experience with an apple OSX experience. It's a completely valid comparison but you're just being mean an inappropriate.

Linux does run on the M1. Not great, yet, but it's getting there.

My bad. You're right. So let's compare Linux on the M1 with OSX on the M1. Which one has the better user experience?

Apparently it runs just fine a little fiddling. https://github.com/mikigal/ryzen-hackintosh

> "The ones that don't complain have low standards.... most Mac users... haven’t experienced anything better."

That's a pretty broad brush you're painting with right there.

It's in reply to "99% of all Mac users are happy" - which brush is more broad?

"100% of the 1%" is less nuanced than "99%".

Lol. Sorry your own experience was bad. Doesn't mean everyone had the same experience as you though.

I ran windows, then linux for ~4 years as a daily driver, switched to mac about a year ago.

I do back end/front end development full time for work + work on many performance sensitive personal projects, and couldn't be happier with the OS.

It's almost like different users have different experiences based on their use cases...

> The ones that don’t complain have low standards.

Wow, well, thanks a lot. I've been developing on both the Mac and Linux for years and I don't have this issue on any of the multiple MBPs I use, including my personal 2013 model. I'm not saying I have no problems on the Mac, but they're not worse than the issues I had with Linux, especially on laptops.

I work daily in Linux, OSX, and Windows. If there was significant differences in responsiveness for day to day usage, I would notice.

OSX is plenty responsive, and I basically never see beachballs.

It's not a matter of low standards.

Is this sort of sweeping generalization really necessary? I can tell you that it's not true in any case. I'm one of those Mac users that doesn't complain about performance, because I rarely see the spinning beach ball.

I haven't seen a spinning beachball on MacOS in years. I'm not even sure it still exists anymore. But also only rarely have a sluggish system, with or without a spinning beachball.

Definitely still exists. I get it in emacs sometimes (god only knows why).

Good to know! I definitely have not seen it in years! (two 2015 Macbooks running Catalina with 16GB).

what are spinning beach balls? i don't understand? like BSOD ?

A cursor indicating the frontmost application is unresponsive.

You are confusing your own personal experience for the standard experience of macOS users. Personally, beachballs are so rare for me in the past few years that I'm always amazed when I see one.

Who am I to deny somebody the opportunity to feel superior? It’s a form of community service.

Thanks for telling me that I have low standards. Amazing considering MacBooks on my desk.