It's not like stack-overflow where often the users are beginners and don't know what they want and it's sometimes helpful to point out XY problems. Here people are technically literate and know what they want yet the requirements are still ignored.
OP has already made the mistake of asking for something very broad in the title, then asking for something very specific in the body. If the title read “Linux laptop” I doubt they would have as many people in the comments suggesting anything else.
Sorry, but that's a cop-out. As others have point out, the real problem is "people just don't read these days". Not even the top few lines of a post. If they did, they would have had no problem finding this important qualifier:
I have no intention of using Windows/MacOSIt would be similar to "Ask HN: Which text editor should I use for software development" with a body that contains "I have no intention of using an IDE or mouse". It's a poorly formed request if your intent is to ask for recommendations amongst the keyboard driven tiled editors.
[0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#bespecifi...
** TODO: Install NixOs and learn how to use declarative configuration. ** TODO: Burst from hearing about the power of org-mode.
Then you can use C-c C-t to rotate the TODO's as you carry them out!
(All comments tongue in cheek from a vim amateur user)
"Guys how do I learn math?"
"Are there any apps that let you type in numbers and add them together?"
"Is there any way I can ask questions to strangers on the web so I dont have to type the equivalent into the Google search bar or look it up on Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, library etc etc etc etc?"
granted my most generous interpretation of this phenomenon is that many of these cases are "kids at keyboard" phenomenon. but its frustrating at times seeing it repeat endlessly here.
Failure rates are pretty much the same given normalized manufacturing and part sourcing.
And the fit and finish debate have been semantically mined to death.
User knows constraints, just pick one!
This is not the sort of choice that needs a support group.
They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth".
I think this is a result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades, and it only pushes me away from this brand.
The same reason console wars exist. If there are multiple choices, and it's not practical to take/use/buy all the options, people feel the need to justify the choice that they did make. When someone's starting from a defensive position, unemotional rationality is uncommon.
AKA, it's human nature.
While i am no apple fanatic, i will readily admit that much of their hardware is designed extremely well from an ergonomic standpoint. Barring obvious failures like their push to make things needlessly thin, a lot of their hardware is durable and holds its value well. Personally, i have a macbook from 2014 that i still use daily for basic tasks and its keyboard is very well built.
While some user behaviour is fanatical, one cannot deny that apply invest a lot into usability of their hardware and software and it shows. Can't say the same for a lot of windows laptops.
The post wasn't about how you engage with the device. It was simply another similar scenario where the same behaviour emerges.
It's an emotional decision dressed in layers of thought and reason.
While is this true, the number of console wars spawned from comparing physical controller feel might bring the parallel back on track.
It's also a form of entertainment.
> unemotional rationality is uncommon
Tangentially, I'm not certain it even exists outside of sociopaths. A certain amount of emotion or beliefs underlies most rational arguments.
The problem is when emotional rationality devolves to either shallowness (i.e. fleeting trends) or fanaticism ("there is only one true option forever").
But shallowness and fanaticism are always present because they are both easier routes to self appeasement in a world that usually pushes people towards lower self concept.
Windows is always lagging with its legacy burden, Linux on desktop doesn't have commercial interest to begin with.
Consoles are pretty much the same unless they have exclusive games.
It's not really emotional matters. Used Windows 10+ years and not missing it.
Linux has also gotten dramatically easier as well of course and is free. I still like MacOS generally but I always thought it was a mistake to completely ignore server-adjacent stuff that powerusers would want. If I buy a Mac and own MacOS why can't I also run a MacOS VM on that same machine? Would be pretty cool to have 3 or 4 running simultaneously with these new processors.
Definitely not.
> Linux on desktop doesn't have commercial interest to begin with
Red Hat is literally IBM now...
For me — FOR ME — it's a great platform that lets me focus on all sorts of things that I want to accomplish with computers.
In my case, I went from a 2015 to a 2019 MacBook Pro. I recognize there were significant keyboard issues in between those years, but my 2019 machine works very well. The only thing is it gets very hot when I’m compiling code. But for the most part I don’t use it on my lap, and this specific issue doesn’t bother me ad much as having a cheaper keyboard, lower quality display, etc.
It's natural human behavior to talk about things we like in relevant contexts, but I really don't see much of it happening anywhere near the top of this comments section. Just ignore it and move on.
It seems like every discussion about Macs or macOS has at least 2-3 comments about how someone had used macOS for years, then got sick of apples (intel) hardware or lack of software customizability and switched to a Linux machine running Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/Manjaro and they are never looking back (except for commenting on every Mac related post on HN).
The only reason we don’t see many Windows fanatics on here is because the user base is more dev focused here and most people prefer *NIX based machines. If this was a gaming focused forum, you would see a lot more Windows fanaticism.
Eh. Gaming forums are full of complaints about windows and what a pain in the ass it is. Old games break, new games break, drivers break, malware concerns, bloated device drivers (glaring at you, Razer) and gamers don't like all the bloatware and analytics crap.
The reason you don't see Windows fanatics on here is because so many people hate dealing with it.
People seem genuinely excited that Steam is pushing more games to Linux.
Or perhaps people really like macOS and their value system is different. I don't think a lot of developers are buying macs due to marketing.
Also, Linux attracts the same fanatic behavior. If you like linux, you don't notice see how many people are pushing it. If you like macOS, you're more likely to notice the people pushing linux because you disagree with them. (And notice the macOS crowd less.)
I've never seen a developer with a macbook in my country. The idea sounds absurd.
Unless you need Final Cut or whatever, Apple is considered a status brand in many parts of the world.
The problems with non-Apple laptops are manifold. Surprisingly, there's very little practical difference between $1k and $4k laptop. System integrators don't spend their budget wisely - they cheap out on some parts, while overspending on other parts purely to drive benchmark numbers, without affecting overall user experience in meaningful ways. Windows laptops get about half the battery life of Macbooks at comparable prices, and Linux is even worse than that. Every Windows laptop I've ever had experienced some problems with drivers after Windows updates (usually Wifi, Bluetooth, webcam or audio) - Linux is even worse. Issues with sleeping, hibernating, or waking up for no discernible reason. Intel Turbo/SpeedStep screwing up thermals and battery life. And more
As much as I dislike Apple, when it comes to laptops, the competition is woefully behind
I suspend and hibernate my ThinkPad constantly, from once to several times a day, with no concerns. My uptimes are usually limited by wanting to have a kernel (or some other low-level) update actually take effect once in a while.
My OS install is old enough that I can't actually remember what kinds of tweaks I may have made power-wise apart from installing TLP, but I get comparable battery life on Linux and Windows. I don't think I'm that far from stock configuration. It used to be worse -- my current OS install was originally on a different laptop -- and battery life was perhaps ~20-25% worse on Linux than on Windows, but I don't see much of a difference nowadays. Intel CPU power states are managed by the CPU itself nowadays anyway.
If there is a difference, it's usually because sometimes script-heavy web pages left open on the background seem to cause Firefox to keep hogging more CPU time on Linux than on Windows.
Sure, hardware choices will be limited. You do have to be selective, and the realistic hardware options may or may not satisfy you, so it's entirely reasonable if e.g. an Apple combination of hardware and software turns out to be more attractive.
Not everything is perfect, of course, but it does sound baffling to hear that "Linux" has these constant issues that I haven't experienced in years in daily use. It's true that you have to pick your hardware, and there's probably still a higher chance of hardware compatibility issues if you haven't paid anybody to make sure the combination works, but in my experience, those stereotypical issues are pretty far from being a universal truth.
In the U.S., at least, whenever I see photos from development conferences (which, admittedly, has been a few years) at least half of all open laptops would be Apples.
Over the years, BigCorp IT had deployed increasing amounts of corporate malware for various reasons. Users would be regularly treated to dialogs from various IT departments (accounting, security, inventory, licensing) demanding that they verify their employee number, job code, physical location, etc; security agents that scanned all disk activity and network traffic; inventory agents that make sure all software was properly licensed; and arbitrary software installations and upgrades that IT incorrectly believed everyone in the company needed.
With a Mac, none of these agents existed, so you didn't have to deal with your computer actively working against you. With newer forms of enterprise management, this overhead should be reduced on both Windows and Macs, but due to inertia all those agents will continue to be installed on Windows long after they are needed.
Though, for the very first time in a long time I had a job with a windows laptop early last year for about 6 months. Holy shit it was a nightmare - if it'd just been Windows, I'd have been fine, but every day there was some new bullshit IT had implemented. I spent so much time fighting that thing, or just being completely lost. The network even had its own MITM thing going on which really messed with vscode (thank god for win-ca extension) - I think they were scanning in real-time to make sure you weren't doing security breaches.
Regardless, it was so over the top it's not funny. This place had less than 20 people, but these insane IT overheads.
With my current job I have been given a top of the line XPS and I gotta say, that screen looks so much better than my 2020 MBP. It's really nice. A few of my colleagues have put Linux on it, but then they can't connect to work VPN, etc. I only use the laptop for connecting to our databases and I just code on my macbook. This is a far bigger company, and they have a great IT team with none of that silliness from the smaller company.
Our devs are picking Macbooks because it's the lesser pain in the butt, many would go with Linux if allowed.
It may be possible to get it running on Wine or CrossOver Office, of course, but most generic Windows-centric corporations probably aren't going to buy Crossover, and "I can't send you a commented version of this document by today because I'm having a random compatibility issue with this non-commercial software combination that other Normal People don't need" isn't going to make you popular.
In places where they are largely affordable for a developer, absurdity becomes relative to what you value in a development system.
Why? Because Linux desktop is garbage (I daily one now too) and gets in the way. Mac you can do anything you need to do in Linux, open terminal nooo problems buddy. brew install whatever you want then switch to a nice interface with a good touchpad that you don't have to half compile yourself.
So after going it alone why did I shell out a stupid amount of money to continue using a mac when my company wasn't providing one? Because now my livelyhood depends on my laptop. I don't want things getting in the way, I don't want things breaking or having to boot into a virtual machine to get something done.
When there's $s involved it's a different caluclation. Total income = hours worked - purchase cost of laptop - hours fluffing around with my dev environment
Therefore, if my linux laptop was to die (like one of my dev's linux laptops did on Monday night) and then I was to miss a day of work, I could afford the difference between a linux craptop and a mac in lost productivity.
As for poor countries not using the best tools, I would say this is systemic. People in Colombia don't appreciate it, you see very few of the locals here using macbooks. But their time is also billed a lot lower.
A Swiss guy one told me that "the right tool is half the job", as much as the Colombians idolise the Germans and Swiss, they've still got a lot to learn.
As a Linux laptop user with an overbearing asshat of a boss, I fucking love this misconception. Getting my working environment set back up after a fresh install is a git clone and 2 minute Ansible run (the majority of the time is spent on packages downloading).
Fortunately, however, if I want to ditch my boss for the day, I can blame Linux. Don't wanna be on video for that call? Sorry, Linux. Don't wanna attend the call at all? Sorry, Linux must have $(bofh excuse).
I'd have absolutely zero motivation to do this if it weren't for my boss blaming everything on Linux out of the gate, but hey, if that's what he wants to do, I'm gonna lean the fuck into it.
But there's so much extra stuff to have everything functioning like keymap, licensing, vpn, restoring file backups, password manager, slack, web browser with security / personalisation settings, aliases, zshrc, ssh keys, every other program that I need to function as a dev (zoom etc). At a speedrun my local machine would take more than 2 hours to setup. That would be after I sourced a replacement, installed whatever os.
As for my dev missing the day, that wouldn't be a happening thing. If he wants to take time off he's entitled to but turning up for work means turning up ready to go. I handed him my spare linux laptop and told him to fix his one in his own time. No B players on my team.
What country is that?
Here is a detailed blog on it: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/cult-of-mac/
That is a good question. But ...
> They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth".
As soon as you can adequately explain why there are people that are vehemently anti-Apple, you will have the answer to this question. You make it sound like it's only pro-Apple people that are fanatics.
This is just it though! You're not describing "Apple fanatics versus Windows fanatics," you're describing "Apple fanatics versus people with an irrational and excessive hatred of Apple fanaticism." Why does this culture exist specifically around Apple?
It doesn't. It also exists around Linux, in general and around each distro. It exists around Windows. It exists around FreeBSD (but you may not have heard from them recently)... It basically exists everywhere.
If you look at a thread about ARM, you will see it there, and the corresponding x86 one too. (And if you are lucky, you will catch some actual x86, not amd64, fans and anti-fans too). Haskell, Rust, Javascript, and PHP threads have those groups too.
The interesting difference between the identities of "Linux user" and "Apple customer" is that one came from grassroots hacker subculture and the other is the product of corporate marketing.
Myself, I have been back and forth between PC (windows) and Apple several times. My priorities have changed over the years and I find PC's fit my requirements to a better extent since 2014. If Apple can bring back a notebook like HP ZBook or Dell Precision I would consider moving. Until then, I will live with the tradeoff's...
I usually stay the heck out of the debate because it devolves to namecalling so quickly, but something about HN makes me want to participate -- the promise of a civil discussion.
Oh, oh! I know this one.
Apple's devices are extremely closed. This is antithetical to the spirit of personal computing. But this is only one component: what ultimately pushes Apple to generate an anti-Apple crowd is the combination of them being a closed platform, them using every dirty trick in the book to suck users into their closed ecosystem, and them being extremely successful at it.
Want to make an iOS app? Buy a Mac. No, not an old Mac, a new one.
Want to send proper messages to an iPhone user? Get an iPhone. Or convince them to install Signal. (I'll wait! LOL.)
Want to make a video call to an iPhone user? Get an iPhone. (Or ask them to install Duo, haha!)
Want to install Mac OS? Buy our hardware.
None of this would matter so much if we were talking about coffee makers. But we're talking about personal computing, a very central component of our nerd lives. If you're a youngster you're probably happy with occasional hardware replacement and messes of dongles, but for many of us our computing experiences are rooted in opening up the box and switching the guts around, or booting different software on the box, and we don't especially appreciate having to constantly battle the hardware vendor to make this happen.
Apple products seem to be very high-quality. But that's not really the point.
I'm pushing 50 and 35 years ago I was building PCs (and selling them, too!). I love building PCs. Still do, it's fun. Tinkering is very enjoyable. I technically have more Linux machines than Macs (though admittedly that requires counting Rasberry Pis).
But. For my 'daily driver' computing, I'm pretty happy in the Apple ecosystem. They sell me 'just works' with a polished interface and I can focus my tinkering on the stuff I want to tinker with. And by infecting my extended family with this opinion, I've lowered my technical support load quite a lot.
It's the same reason that years ago I stopped modding my daily driver car, and moved that passion into a hobby instead.
I can compile for EVERY PLATFORM from my Arch Linux, just not for Apple stuff.
It's ridículous... This kind of behavior reminds me of Ballmer's Microshit.
1. Why do some people seem to be so fanatical about their love for Macs?
2. Why do some people seem to be so vocally fanatical online about their love for Macs?
As far as #1 goes, I think it's just about finding something that you have to use every day that you are much happier with. I have found small pieces of software that have made me jump for joy simply because they resolved a small problem; it's not hard to understand why someone would become so fanatical about switching to a a completely new piece of hardware and OS that they feel works so much better than what they were previously using.
I used to have long and aggressive arguments with my college roommate about why Windows was superior to OS X and said that I would never even consider owning an Apple product. I've been using a Mac now for work and personal use for a little over a decade and I dread every time I need to use my Windows machine for certain work tasks.
I think this is perfectly understandable and I don't think there's anything wrong with people going through the process of finding something that changes the way they do something major in their lives.
#2, however, tends to be more unpleasant when it becomes vitriolic/persistent. I think this is just a symptom of the happiness that exists from feeling like you've found the greener grass (and wanting to share that with others) mixed with an inability to understand the negative aspects of aggressively stating to complete strangers that the preferences of others are objectively wrong. I think this is inevitable considering the Mac is still considered the "alternate" option for some reason, and it's paired (inevitably) with those that feel that the fanaticism for the alternate option is unwarranted.
I think the tech sector has always attracted both skeptics and idealists/innovators, and that's bound to create an environment where you'll have groups that feel like it's their duty to inform others of what they feel is the better way and groups of people that feel like it's their duty to temper unwarranted fanaticism.
For me it's the opposite. Maybe I'm missing something obvious or I've had back luck with peripherals, but when trying to do something as simple as disabling mouse acceleration involves nonsense like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/it420s/how_to_quickl... it's just baffling to me. I am noticeably less productive on Mac computers because of weird quirks like the mouse acceleration.
In that thread, you'll see people for whom that fix does work, and doesn't work, and other fixes that for some people do work, and don't work, and people that have no idea what's going on.
Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, but when I switch from working on the Android version of my apps on Windows, to working on the iOS version of my apps on Mac, I feel like I'm using an aesthetically pleasing toy that just wasn't meant for productivity.
That's not to say all Apple products are bad.
Except, there is not a single Windows/Intel based laptop that can offer the same performance as say, for example, an M1 Macbook air ($750).
There really is no comparison and there is nothing that comes close on the Windows side at that price point. If there is, please link me because I would love to know.
M1 has made Macbooks not only superior in performance, but also more economically viable than Windows.
Instead, I got a Ryzen 5800U based 13" machine for 780 Euros which came with a much more spacious 1TB NVME and 16Gigs of RAM for that added piece of mind when spinning up some VMs. That's much better value for me for a workhorse, plus it runs any linux flavor natively. The equivalently specked M1 Air would be 1820 Euros.
And best of all, the screen hinge rotates full 180 degrees, which for me was a must vs the screen on the Macbook and most other laptops that for some reason stick to 110 degrees and limits the positions I can use it from.
Sure, the Ryzen 5800U won't reach the same Geekbench scores as the M1, but the performance still puts it in the top percentile of CPUs on the market right now including the M1, and plus, CPU cycles are infinite while RAM and storage are finite.
As an added bonus I can also play nearly any game on Steam on it despite the device being barely thicker than the Type-C port.
Different strokes for different folks.
You should inform yourself about how RAM and SSDs work and read actual benchmark instead of parroting some wild claims that even Apple's marketing does not mention since having NAND storage at DRAM speed is just absurd.
Plus, using your SSD as RAM not only takes a performance hit but induces premature NAND wear turning your unrepairable M1 MacBook into e-waste sooner.
If you want 16gb memory you're paying at least 1700gbp.
If you want 32gb, it's 2999gbp.
Most Windows laptops have upgradable memory and you can buy yourself 32gb ram for ~100gbp.
A Macbook Air with 16GB memory and 256GB SSD is £1,199 including 20% VAT in the UK.
For example, I just changed the notebook graphics card on a refurbished HP ZBook... I paid $275 for a Gen 3 and upgraded the Graphics card for another $350. It was a lot easier than I thought and this computer is a beast.
Ever think it’s simply because they are amazing machines instead of being some conspiracy or mass brainwashing?
They are OK. Not jaw droppingly good, just okay-ish. I work as a mobile app dev and unfortunately you can't avoid Mac for iOS dev :p
It's an incredible machine though. The perf and battery life remind me of the upgrade I got when switching from a HDD to a SSD for the first time. It changes how I use the device.
The 2017-18 macbook pros (touchbar) were complete rubbish. Everything was rubbish. Keyboards. Heat. Battery. Processors.
The M1s are gods gift to developers. By far the best laptop I've used, and I don't see how anyone else can catch up
PCs are usually cheaper and can pull better benchmark numbers, but most Windows laptops have weird little issues and quirks that add up. I find myself a lot more productive on a Mac than a Windows laptop, which more than makes up for any price difference. I can add hacks to make Windows work, but even those aren't as intuitive as Mac productivity software.
A bit like a snowball scheme, where you try to get more and more people to buy in and commit to it. Then they will be your cool Apple friends and you can exchange with them without problems.
Ultimately the lock-in of that whole ecosystem pushes people away from it though. Most knowledgeable people, who can avoid it will avoid it, because they do not want non-standard hardware, missing ports, 400€ monitor stands and stuff like that.
I use one at my desk because I want Ethernet and I use an external monitor, but when I take my laptop on the go I never bring dongles because I truthfully don't need them.
Of course, there's religious devotees to all 3. I throw my lot in with the Linux crowd because of freedom: freedom to use the software and not give a fuck about anyone's philosophy or religiousity. And the knowledge that it'll always be open source, I'll always "own" my software, etc...
I am not sure if you really are expected to give a fck about those things when using any of the major OSes. MacOS does not require you to swear allegiance to the cause of gender equality, even if the company behind it does indeed favour it.
Now if you want to participate in developing free software, for good or bad, those things are no longer immaterial, and if you have unpopular ideas about religion or philosophy you will sooner or later be ostracised and some hip code of conduct thingy will be the last thing you will see there.
No but the company follows a certain direction and you need to buy-in to their idea of the future if you want the seamless experience they promise. For the full Apple "experience" you need multiple Apple devices, an Apple ID, etc...
Windows is slightly more open but similar; you need to buy-in to their ecosystem.
With Linux I can use Gnome, KDE or other... A bunch of distros. A bunch of browsers (without ads, annoyance, etc...). Anything that's an open standard basically works. There is maybe slight buy-in needed to work with my Chromecast (need Chrome on it) but that's an okay compromise.
> Now if you want to participate in developing free software, for good or bad, those things are no longer immaterial, and if you have unpopular ideas about religion or philosophy you will sooner or later be ostracised and some hip code of conduct thingy will be the last thing you will see there.
You can develop free software and ignore those things. Just work on your own thing. But you seem to mean "participate in existing project with existing organization" which is different than your first fragment.
Honestly I'd rather be using Windows on a ThinkPad. I really really like windows, PuTTY, MS office etc and I even like spending time in Visual Studio. But the hardware quality has declined to near zero in the PC market and lets not even get into a discussion about the shit show that windows and the dev story on it has become in the last few years.
Please don't suggest WSL either. I have no energy for that and its associated problems.
Really it comes down to the least stinky turd. I wish one of the big vendors (MS / Apple / Linux Vendor X) would really try and concentrate on making the best user-centric experience because at the moment they're all failing. Apple is just failing less hard and when time is money, I'm just having to pay through the nose for a little bit of edge.
Thinkpad with Windows 11 and WSL2 is mindblowing
- solid and beautiful chassis, no plastic-y uninspired 2008-Dell design here.
- large, beautiful, high-DPI screen looks great and has crisp text. You can seamless rescale the UI to get effectively a 17" resolution or 13", depending on how big you want your UI elements to be.
- the trackpad feels fantastic to your fingers! Two-finger scrolling through a document is so natural and ergonomic. Whenever I use the stupid Windows mouse wheel, it's either 3 lines at once, which is not enough, or one page at a time, which is way too much; I've never used a Windows laptop with a trackpad, I hope scrolling on that doesn't work like the mouse wheel.
- macOS is a Unix that works. Sleep works out of the box, every time. Wifi works, and connects instantly when you open the lid. After configuring the settings on first install, I basically never do sysadmin again for the life of that version of the OS. (I re-install from scratch when I upgrade; I know the happy path will work, but as a software developer, I know upgrading has all kinds of edge cases)
- macOS has a very consistent look and feel, and looks elegant. It also has all sorts of little details that go practically unnoticed but add up to a better experience.
For non-technical users:
- there is an Apple store within about 2 hours where you can talk to a live person, try out the machine in person, etc. which makes you feel secure.
- I have had exactly one macOS tech support request in over ten years (some girl did not know how to free up disk space). Contrast with Windows, where the problem is practically un-debuggable, or Linux, where once your problem goes off the rails of the config UI you'd better know how to use the command line.
- Comes with a lot of useful software (Pages, Garage Band, iPhoto, etc.), unlike Windows which comes with nothing (and a few toy apps like Notepad and Paint).
- You don't need to be a tech expert to buy a Mac. Just get the size you want and it works.
Contrast this with Windows, where every program looks completely different (makes Linux look consistent). Windows is user-hostile (forced reboots, resists creating a local account, I cannot edit the Send To menu anymore, etc.) The user-experience of Windows is the equivalent of the Big Ball of Mud design pattern.
Contrast with Linux, where you can do absolutely anything you want, but nothing ever fully works. If you had more time you could fix those little corners, but it's just not worth it. Or you'd have to add features to this app. Or your favorite window manager (Sawfish) gets harder and harder to install. Or you fight with Pulse Audio / Jack / ALSA for this particular sound program.
And if your primary value is spending as little money as possible, Apple will drive you nuts. For what you get, the price is fair, it's just that there's no option for a lower trim model. Don't need Thunderbolt? Too bad, you're getting a fast interconnect whether you want it or not.
The thing is, there is something intangible about high-end stuff that goes from "this does what I want and I don't think about it" to "I enjoy the experience of using this". It's a little like wearing high-end fabrics, or eating at a high-end restaurant. Necessary? Absolutely not. But it's that enjoyment it gives that creates the "fanaticism".
- Pretty much every modern Windows trackpad has two finger scrolling that works fine.
- You can also get mice with free scrolling wheels like the Logitech MX Master line that switch between free spinning and ratcheted. Sometimes ratcheted scrolling is better particularly for gaming or if you only want to scroll a small amount.
- Wifi works on my Linux laptops too. Sleep too. Just don't buy crap that doesn't work with Linux.
- Maybe there is an Apple store 2 hours away. Maybe there's one 5 hours away. Or a an hour flight away. Maybe 2 hours is still too far away for you so you're stuck mailing the stupid thing while your friend gets the Dell tech show up at his house.
- Just get the size you want and spend considerably more. Want a 16" laptop? Just spend $1500 more.
- Try explaining to your tech illiterate friend why their 13" M1 MBP only works with 1 monitor while their old 13" Intel MBP worked with two.
- At least you can use your favorite WM on Linux?
> Just don't buy crap that doesn't work with Linux.
See, this is exactly my point. Blame the user... I don't want to have to research what works well. Even if I know it works, it may take quite a while to figure out how to get it to work. It took me two weeks of recompiling kernels to get my T42 to go to sleep, and the trick was "acpi_sleep=s3" as a boot parameter. (Technically, it went to sleep just fine, it just hung in the kernel on wake, which was arguably worse) Judging by other comments sleep is still an issue. That's with one of the major features of a laptop...
(The wifi wasn't a problem per se, it's just that Ubuntu broke the auto-detection at one point. It was working prior, and they've since fixed that, but I've never had that problem on a Mac.)
> why their 13" M1 MBP only works with 1 monitor while their old 13" Intel MBP worked with two
How many people are trying to power two monitors off a 13" MBP? I'm not saying Apple doesn't have issues (I'm using a 2018 MBP that's had the keyboard replaced once, and the letters have dissolved off five keys so far, and I wasn't happy about needing to buy it because I wanted to wait until the keyboard problem was fixed, which it was six months later, but my 2012 MBP stopped displaying pixels thanks to a client project which involved compiling all day, triggering the nVidia heatsink problem), but if you're the kind of person that needs two monitors, cheaping out on the laptop doesn't seem like a great idea. Next you'll be telling me they don't have enough RAM on their 8 GB laptop to run all the programs that would make two monitors useful...
> At least you can use your favorite WM on Linux?
Actually, I cannot. My favorite WM is sawfish, which requires some package that is a major pain to compile (or maybe there are too many for me to spend the effort, and the only extant packages are 32-bit, can't remember). The default Ubuntu thing was awful, GNOME too dumbed down, KDE apps crash all the time for me (but maybe I have some setting in the .files I've been copying around for 20 years?) and KDE's aesthetics historically managed to make Windows look polished. No, I explicitly don't want a tiling WM. So I've settled on XFCE, which has about the visual polish of KDE, but at least it's lightweight. And I spend most of the time on the Mac, where the window manager does what I want. (With the exception of sawfish's raising the app under consideration during Alt-Tab, that's a great feature, don't have to look at those icons, just look for the window I want)
Is it crazy to expect a $1000 laptop these days can handle 2 external monitors? Especially when it's predecessor could? If you're just using 2 monitors to look at spreadsheets or a web browser why spend an extra $1000 for more CPU and RAM you might not even need? Even crappy Intel integrated graphics will do it so long as there's the video outputs.
I’ve ran MacBook for mobile dev and pc for in home for over a decade. Swapped to new m1pro and finally ditched my windows desktop. Still keep a local esxi server with windows dev vm in case. But Best upgrade I’ve had in awhile.
Didn't have that problem with another keyboard on the same MacBook, and I haven't had that problem with the same keyboard on a Windows machine.
I have mac, linux, and windows machines at home and in the words of Three Dead Trolls "every OS sucks"
Would you reconsider this wording, so that we can focus on your story rather than a flippant mention of their gender?
“Some girl” is definitely not nice phrasing and only furthers gender stereotypes.
I read the same post and I only focussed on the story and flippant mention on gender never crossed my mind until you brought it up..
So they need external validation for their choice, which they get by seeing everyone else switching to the Mac ecosystem as well.
It’s not that apple users are fanatics, it’s that some people define their identity by their OS and will make absolutely certain you know.
Meanwhile, some of us just wanted a decently polished desktop GUI that runs a unix command line natively. You could say that Windows now supports this, and Linux desktops have made some progress, but when I switched over to primarily using OSX for my workstation years ago, neither was remotely true. I stick with it because inertia, just like most everyone else.
Yep, I bet a lot of people are like that. That's why I use Linux on the desktop: I've been using it for like 6 years and I can't be bothered to try anything else since this is what I know.
MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the Linux kernel.
I think the way this conversation played out was "given how I use my device, is there an optimal device to buy?" A lot of the answers are, in turn, "why don't you use your device differently? having ignored your use cases and preferences, this is the device I'd recommend."
It might be a valid opinion to say "I don't use Linux and I enjoy using MacOS on Apple Silicon" but... it doesn't actually help the original poster, does it? So why post that at all?
I guess I could point out to the poster that I use Windows 10, and I built a desktop PC. It doesn't really meet any of their criteria (except #3 computing power), but... it works for me. So maybe they should change and be more like me!
As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion.
Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations.
My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running.
Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way.
I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here.
Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
Edit: Missed the 'z', sorry, possibly explains different experiences.
I really liked my XPS when I got it, but I'm pretty jaded about Linux support for laptops ever being good enough to compete with something like Apple. And at the end of the day I care a lot more about having a high quality Unix based OS than whether or not that OS is libre (sorry to say).
My XP13 9370 running Fedora lasts maybe 2 hours at a push. I'm actually considering moving back to a 14" MacBook Pro because of the battery life.
Rumours of an imminent M2 upgrade are about the only thing stopping me now.
The XPS 13 is a much larger device (better cooling). The 13z ruined me ever buying another Dell. I really wanted to love that laptop and NOT buy a $3k macbook. I really want the 2n1 feature.
I switched to MacPorts when Homebrew moved on from macOS Mojave... now I wish I had done so much sooner!
Honestly, Nix is the only package manager I really like on Mac.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30917354#30918593
> seems to be an issue of macOS and the root dir being read-only
> Took me a month to finally remove Nix from my macOS
https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/6206#issuecomment-105938...
I have a 2020 Mac with the highest fucking configuration (32GB RAM and i7 8-core 10th gen) and the fans on it are always going off.
I figure a laptop with a discrete GPU can handle external screens and graphics much better than integrated, but was wondering what your take on the M1 mac for this would be.
I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive.
And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
> I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
1. https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/269174/disable-the...
edit - I just timed the sleep functionality. After 60 seconds it dims, and then 15 seconds later it goes to sleep completely....such a horrible implementation
However since apple decided that only "either" was an option, I'm much happier with having the function keys back.
I like the key travel of my (personal) 2015 MBP compared to the 2019 MBP I have for work. I put a keyboard cover on the 2019 and it feels less bad.
I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows.
With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades? Mail is great too unlike Windows' very poor default one.
Windows now looks 10 years behind with no ability to catch up to the ARM standard and Linux, well, never.
> It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Yeah, it's far from perfect but it's really light on battery and is ~never the cause of beachballs while I'm using some other program, neither of which were the case with FF or Chrome, for me :-/ My ideal browser doesn't exist, but Safari definitely feels closer to it than FF or Chrome do. They get all the add-on stuff right, while Safari gets the fundamentals right.
> Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Bizarre. I'm a dock-hider (carried over from being a start-menu-hider on Windows for years and years) and hadn't noticed that. If I open a terminal window and drag the bottom down, sure enough, there's a little bit at the bottom I can't get it to go past. Oddly, if I use Spectacle to "maximize" it or send it to the left or right half of the screen, it manages to go a little lower (still not quite all the way!), but then the top has a tiny gap, like it's splitting the bottom gap between the top and bottom. Thanks, now that will bug me forever :-) I wonder if it's got something to do with line height?
> Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Yeah, it's no Office replacement if you need Office. I'm fortunate that it's just for my own use or for generating PDFs. They're like Abiword and Gnumeric on Linux (which were what I preferred over the bloated mess of OpenOffice on that platform) in that they're relatively lightweight but still fairly capable—except they don't crash as much and just, you know, work better.
> Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades?
It's straight up stupid that Preview can be an actual selling point for macOS in the year 2022, and yet, I can't point to a single similar program (or even just a PDF reader) on another desktop OS that's even close to it, and I've used tons of them over the years.
Same.
It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem.
Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
First thing I did when I got my M1 though is partition the drive and dual boot asahi though.
I wish it had more and better extensions, but the battery life savings and general lighter feel/effect on overall system responsiveness is so large that I put up with that unless I really have to have better dev tools or something. All my normal browsing happens in Safari. Took me like 3 years to convert after starting to use Macs, as I initially dismissed it, but damn, it's way lighter than FF or Chrome.
> Preview is the PDF viewer right?
It's a lots-of-things viewer, but its PDF support is so good that it made me go from hating when something was in a PDF, which had been the state of things with every PDF viewer I'd ever used since first encountering the format some time in the 90s, to liking PDFs. It's lightweight (like most of Apple's tools, I can just leave it in the background and forget it's there), crashes are extremely rare (maybe one or two in a decade or more of use?), and it supports all kinds of nice-to-have stuff like compiling a PDF from pages of other PDFs, removing or re-ordering pages, signing, light image editing and markup capabilities, et c.
The two things that bug me: no markdown support, and no built-in export (but the format's simple and well known and there are existing 3rd party tools that can do it). Everything else is so good and so stable that I've been hesitant to go looking for something else to try to fill in those two features. I can live with a formatting bar and export being a little annoying if everything else is basically perfect.
Why? Because the host machine sucks less at all the desktop stuff that Linux is horrible at and the VM wins at all the server and dev stuff the Mac sucks at.
Any OS can virtualize Linux, so the host doesn't really matter.
Besides, it's usually the software that matters and not the OS.
Now some of that is alleviated if you are building non-machine learning ARM images, but you may run the risk of not having ARM versions of third-party containers you need.
I personally regret not thinking ahead about this and buying a MacBook Pro a few years ago. Either with Linux directly, or with Windows WSL2, I don't think developers need to buy a macOS machine unless they need to build iOS or macOS apps. And even then, you can rent time on GitHub-hosted Actions macOS runners instead.
The only remaining limitation are missing some ARM docker containers (which is slowly being solved) and the machines not being suitable for ML (in which case you need a desktop or to rent server time on the cloud).
I cab run a Ubuntu server VM at good performance on VMware.
Also consider gaming. Considering that GPU virtualization is not really a thing still, I cannot imagine, for example, gaming being easier on macOS, and the VM requires additional setup too.
See: https://github.com/mitchellh/nixos-config
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubDMLoWz76U
Only real limitations are lack of ML because no server/desktop-grade GPU and some missing ARM-based docker containers. But the latter is slowly being resolved and the former isn't gonna happen on a laptop anyways.
Or just run it on real hardware! It's my preferred workflow.
These two comments of ours are equally pointless.
Before, there were a multitude of reasons not to develop in a VM: Poor support for accelerated instructions on laptops; Slow CPUs; limited RAM; slow file-sharing between the host and guest.
The M1 architecture solves most of the issues.
Modern laptops almost universally support accelerated instructions now. This means less overhead, so doing everything entirely in the VM is worth it now. So no more dealing with slow file-sharing.
The speed of the M1 also means you're not limited compared to your desktop. Depending on the benchmark (especially any benchmark relying on CPU cache size), it may be faster on the M1 air than on a 5950X. Even in workloads where the laptop is slower, it is now fast enough.
Running docker containers in a VM on a 16GB *non-M1* machine is untenable. The M1's RAM is not only higher bandwidth and lower latency, but the compression and caching has improved so much that you can fit much more in that same 16GB.
In use-cases where you need more than 16GB, the M1's NVMe disk is so low latency that swap usage is indistinguishable in performance from RAM usage. So the laptop has no memory limit, for practical purposes (though the wear on the disk is increased in this case).
In addition, ARM architectures were a pain to deal with before, so most people emulated x86_64 and assume that you'd still have to do that on the M1. Nowadays, there is no reason not to run an ARM Linux in the VM. Most programs run just fine, and the remaining holdouts are a few Docker containers that haven't been updated. But even those aren't a problem because recent improvements to Docker greatly simplify running x86_64 containers under QEMU.
Combine all of this with the Mac app ecosystem (which has its problems, but is generally OK to use, especially if your other devices come from Apple), improved battery, the return of the good keyboard, and greatly lowered TDP, there really isn't a choice to make anymore.
The remaining reasons not to use it are basically as follows:
1) Compatibility with external devices, or work on embedded controllers
2) Anything requiring significant GPU compute (ML, etc.). But this would likely be done on a desktop rather than a laptop, which wasn't the scope of the question.
3) Disk capacity requirements (though external NVMe over thunderbolt mostly solves this)
4) Extremely multi-threaded work (video editing, etc.) where a desktop CPU outperforms the M1's multi-thread score.
Less pointless now?
Yeah! Now you added substance. Great!
Parent just seems to have an axe to grind and took the opportunity to hijack a thread about recommendations.
The problem is most workarounds I've seen are either to severly limit the games I can play or to get another computer/console for playing games, which just seems to be turning one problem into two. You can't even dualboot anymore, now that we have M1.
In public forums, one should assume both the questions and the answers to be for a wider audience. People are here for the alternate takes, the discussions, etc. Built-in to the interface of this site and many like it are tools to hide threads, in part or in entirety, and to downvote posts or threads deemed inappropriate or irrelevant.
I guess my main counterpoint is that it's a bit vain to expect a diverse public forum to be one's own personal consultancy / counsel / etc.
For me personally, disable the new virtualization framework and gfuse options. I hope they're working better for others, but I'm not seeing any benefits yet and CPU usage dropped significantly after disabling these
Sure, use Linux.
now i have to deal with horrible performance everywhere because of falcon agent and docker.
There's software I can't even install because there aren't arm versions of it available.
What are people supposed to say besides, let's help you resolve that excuse?
It's not a cult, it's the free market at work.
Guys. I mean. Seriously. It’s a laptop. It’s not worth a request for comments every week.
I did do some reading before posting. Here are some of the threads I had read before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21302412
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861949
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28216287
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28023345
None of the threads seemed to have a consensus e.g. some swear by the Dell XPS 13, others say the laptop has been a crap experience more or less. Others still prefer Lenovo Thinkpad variants, and even these have those who've had negative experiences. I was hoping for a winner of some sort or at least a list of recommended laptops that I can bookmark and spend time reading reviews of. Hope that makes sense and sorry for the inconvenience caused.
That probably answers your question ;-). Along with the fact that you found multiple previous discussions. There is no consensus to be had, everyone will have their own particular definition of 'good' and the variance is so wide that you'll just have to figure it out for yourself.
I have a system76 oryx pro running pop os. It’s older now (8th gen intel). Works well, though I had a fan start grinding, it was an easy replacement. The machine is a clevo so replacement parts are easy to get. I like it. My previous home machine was a 2014 Mac book. Oryx is bigger, faster, heavier. The build quality isn’t as good as the Mac but it decent. It has nvidia graphics which even run games. Battery life isn’t great, especially when running the nvidia card (you can switch to intel graphics ). It upgrades the os easily unless like me you do so manual stuff.. system 76 support is good (part of what you pay a premium for)
I just got work to buy a new system 76 machine for me. The amd laptop model “pangolin”. I like it so far.
You’re trying to predict your future. No one here can help with that.
You know your philosophical constraints. Hardware across vendors fails at largely the same rate due to normalized manufacture and sourcing patterns now. It all comes from the same few parts bins pretty much. The key specs are listed on each site.
Reality is you have roughly the same risk of getting a lemon or finding a laundry list of nitpicks with any choice.
I scrolled down pretty far and didn’t see a single top-level comment anywhere close to what you’re describing about people blindly advocating Macs.
Maybe you joined early, but comments like yours bringing up a problem that doesn’t exist is PART of the problem you’re complaining about.
If you want a laptop for development - get MacBook. I used to be a die-hard Windows guy about 10 years ago. After that switched to Linux on my Desktop and used it for a year. When I switched job they gave me MBP 2011 model, I hated it. The OS, but not the laptop. The new 2015 MBP were complete garbage, but I got used to macOS. The M1 laptops are the only laptops I would suggest to anybody. The battery life is so amazing, no overheating issues, I love it.
My work also depends on Linux, I have my own company, that provides tools for monitoring Kubernetes, OpenShift and Docker. Only OpenShift is sketchy on arm64, everything else works great. https://github.com/lima-vm/lima is a great tool to run Linux VM. Also Docker for Mac and Rancher Desktop both work perfectly!
But switching to Mac could be a challenge. I was always big fun of Thinkpad laptops, especially X1 Carbon. My wife uses it (she is Windows geek). But obviously this laptop is a laptop, not a computing machine. If you need computing power, just go to Costco and get yourself a gaming laptop with good video card (3060 would be in your price range). Read this https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/srxtrx/gamin... to see which laptop provides enough power to the graphics card. But of course those gaming laptops are more like desktops you can easily move. The power bricks are huge, and laptops are heavy.
Another option to consider is to get a Desktop, you can buy used Workstations/Servers from companies like https://tekboost.com/ I got from them 2 x Nvidia Quadro M4000 8GB, Dual Xeon E5-2680V4 2.4GHz 14C, 256GB RAM for about 4k. For 2k I am sure you can find something that can fit your budget.
I mean, it's already kind of stupid to want to avoid something the whole industry uses, from big tech to startups. In particular, when you have a very hard set of requirements that historically no one gets right except for you know who.
Windows still owns the market to a substantial degree, Macos is still a niche OS. Maybe you've seen a trend of software companies moving to Macos, but it's definitely not the standard by any means.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
and then try and dispute what I said. Those numbers aren't even close.
Sure, maybe MacOs is growing, and less niche than it used to be. I'm not disputing that.
But come on here.
Which is as diametrically opposite of the industry standard as you can get.
Or anything in San Francisco for that matter, in my time in PayPal only one dude in the whole office had a windows machine
You won't see a Mac almost anywhere.
The numbers don't lie. Windows is more widely used than MacOS right now, period. And it's not even close.
Maybe that is starting to change, maybe we're in for another round of companies going "This is what they do at Google" and playing follow the leader. Maybe. But that's not the conversation we're having.
If you want to have that conversation, make those points. Not this "but it's what FAANG uses" appeal to authority nonsense.
Citation needed. With actual stats to back it up.
The reasonable answer at the end of the day remains
> Cool, use what works for you.
There are use cases where Macs are useless or such a PITA to work with (ugh native compilation), others where they're kinda necessary (i.e. iOS development), and there's been no info about this from OP, so the most reasonable thing to do is still to acknowledge they have a good reason, and stop forcing Macs into the suggestions, even more so by using baseless arguments.
Then I started a job that issued me a MacBook Pro. And got to see, use, and develop for, a shitload of Android and iOS devices, both phones and tablets.
Turns out I'd just never given them a chance.
But yes, I'm sure Apple users are just dumber than you, and that's all it is.
I too fell for the Apple marketing cult. I was excited when I got my first MacBook. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. The keyboard felt terrible and broke frequently, the insistence of dongles to make up for the anemic port selection was a constant annoyance, the touchbar was a myopic UX catastrophe, the touchpad was worse than on PC laptops that I've used, the software was outdated, configurability and lack of control was appalling, and it was abundant with boneheaded design decisions that favored form over function. At least the screen was nice. Today it sits gathering dust in the corner.
But yes, I'm sure non-Apple users are just too dumb to appreciate Jobbesian bliss, and that's all it is.
This was well before the super-shitty run they had where they went all-USB-C, Touch Bar (ugh), and ruined their keyboards, though. I'd probably have been a lot less impressed if that was my introduction to their stuff.
Besides raw specs of CPUs and GPUs, which the fashion company is encroaching on too, my non-fashion product's trackpads, screen color quality, sound quality, screen hinges, heat dissipation locations, power efficiency, keyboards, case flex, case materials, weight, size, storage speeds, and upgradability are just some of the things that all suck on my Lenovo, Microsoft and Asus laptops my household owns and that my fashion laptops consistently do better.
My non-fashion products manage to put better refresh rate screens in, and I can get gaming capable discrete GPUs, and one of them lets me upgrade the RAM aftermarket, but for the most part they're all worse products that have lower utility than the fashion products. The perception they engender with me is that they're the only company that builds a product they don't secretly loathe.
The same way you're attempting to social signal by putting Apple down as a luxury fashion company?
I used to be a windows person, and had the same opinion about macs as you, but now I exclusively buy macs for myself and my family bc I am the family’s IT support team. And guess what? The amount of time and headaches it saved me over the years can’t be understated. It would not have been possible with Linux.
My mother can drag and drop an app into applications folder but even that is a stretch. She however can easily open the App Store and click buy, using the same UX as on her phone. Guess how many things are intuitive to her across her ipad, iPhone and Mac, that she almost never has to call me for anything.
I have my family on a family sharing plan with my card on it (I have terrible things to tell Apple about the fact that I have no granular control abt who or how much people can spend there) , but the fact that they are able to get what they need to be productive without having to research the many different ways an application is installed, or how it’s impossible to uninstall or to handle all those MSIs or whatever the windows installers do now, or virus scanning everything under the sun (and let me not forget about the mcaffee and avg and avast licenses and adware from companies that are supposed to be legitimate and give you peace of mind)…is priceless (I know, sounds like an Apple ad, but it’s true).
More, the integration with the outside world, how people can record voice, take notes, photos and have these things readily available everywhere. The finder app, and how I don’t need 100 different apps to view things I download from the web or get from an external source. Again, priceless.
You can geolocate, disable, brick your stolen hardware, no extra software, apps or cost. Super useful, I forgot my laptop in a cab once at an airport, my mother had hers stolen. Both are confirmed bricked. Maybe other brands/OSes have this now, but I have no time to find out.
Back to my family, how they can subscribe to things like scribd, audio books, udemy, and a bunch of other things without having to go through all the marketing pages and double speak of these services online and be able to cancel immediately if they need, gives them a lot of power and I’m glad they can get what they need when they need and move on with their lives. My mother is a lawyer, she should not spend her time fighting an OS.
Linux would be better than windows, but it has failure modes that require admin level terminal skills to solve. I use Linux server, but I have no need for the desktop atm.
Finally, maybe today is different or I never looked hard enough, but it used to be that to get a Linux laptop, I’d need to get a windows laptop and dual boot or wipe it and install Linux.
I may have time for this with servers (that’s my work), and I may have had time for this when I was in college, but I most certainly do not have time for this now.
Maybe if it were as easy to just walk into a store or get online and buy a Linux laptop back then, I might have gone Linux desktop rather than Mac.
In my mind, windows is hell, Linux is expert level, Mac is for everyone.
This is not an answer for this post, I would also like to get the answer and maybe I’ll try that.
Cults were never paying their people, and like to demean outsiders. So there’s that.
But we're serious. OP has created their own nonsensical boundaries with these constraints. Essentially the title is completely misleading apart from the 2K number. If OP is looking specifically for a linux-compatible machine they should have at least mentioned that in the title. It's no suprise at all that these types of answers are in this thread.
I saw the title, came here to offer my thoughts about mac options, when I realize that actually "not allowed" by OP's request. It's click baity and almost feels like it was designed to get a rise out of the HN crowd.
There's a meaningful title, and a set of perfectly common and reasonable requirements in an ordered, clear, explicit fashion that we all normally wish requester would follow.
But because some jumped in with their own agenda, and feel stifled... now these are "nonsensical boundaries" :->
(Plus, I mean, if somebody wanted a mac... how much advice or options do they need ? Want a mac, get a mac. That part of equation is not exactly complicated, for better or for worse, is it? So let's not pretend this was anything but zealots wanting to chime in :)
You do you, Hacker news :)
Get a grip.
"I've had these problems with Mac"
Reasonable response: Cool, use what works for you. EDIT> Here are some suggestions that match your constraints.
Annoying response 1: You should reconsider because Mac works great for me.
Annoying response 2: Your problems aren't real problems.
Annoying response 3: Let's live debug your problems in this thread to see if they're real problems.
Guys. I mean. Seriously.