> Also, the fact that I can't independently control the scroll direction of mice and trackpads is insane to me.

Oh yeah I just plugged a mouse into a work Mac recently and was super confused at this. Yes I’ve gotten used to natural scrolling on touchpads by now, but no that doesn’t mean I want it on a scroll wheel!

This starts to make sense when you see the mice that apple sells don't have wheels, they have a touch surface on top. And if you aren't using an apple mouse you're off the happy path and stuck toggling settings forever.

Yeah, I used to use a Magic Mouse years ago. They now aggravate my RSI terribly though. This kind of thing feels like Apple telling me their stuff is not for me.

> "it just works"

It does just work. You're just using it wrong.

Keep that second sentence in mind whenever people say that first line and you'll never have any issues with apple fans

I'm a fan of apple MacOS as of late, specifically because the rigidity leads to easier computer usage to me.

I'd hesitate to lump all apple fans around the few vocal ones. The vast majority of people that like apple don't push a cult of "it just works". Most people I know just recognize a computer as a computer, not an identity.

What I find amusing is just how much of an identity being anti-Apple has be come. You know, the people who will jump at any vague opportunity to profess their hate for anything Apple. I used to be in that camp.

I gave up on fanboyism years ago and nowadays I've found I like almost every platform for different reasons.

My secret to happiness on a Mac: focus your energy on figuring out how the designers want you to use a tool. Don't fight the design, work with it. Don't change the defaults, live with them.

Some folks love to fiddle with settings and tweak configs to get everything just right... but this is a recipe for disappointment when an upgrade removes the secret config you found or hard-codes a setting that was previously available as a preference.

Some of the defaults are just plain bad and assume you never want or need to use another computer. The scroll wheel thing is particularly bad. Like imagine if Apple decided all their laptops now were going to come with Dvorak keyboards instead of Qwerty. "Sorry Gram, I need to change your keyboard layout before I can solve your computer problem".

Don't mess with users' muscle memories for your design for literally no gain. That's bad design.

Honestly, I think Apple just forgets people use a mouse. The default trackpad scroll direction matches iPads and touchscreens. Their oversight was coupling trackpad and mouse wheel scroll direction. Until I had a job where I needed both I didn't really care...and I found an open source utility that addressed it[1].

[1] https://github.com/Caldis/Mos

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because your opinion is (in my opinion) perfectly valid. I spent 6 to 12 months forced onto a Mac by the company I worked for and I reached the same conclusion. Learning to subjugate one's personal preferences to the way the designers designed it is a good strategy on Mac (and to some extent Gnome on Linux).

I spent untold hours on Mac trying to recreate my Linux environment, and after cobbling together a number of different tools (some paid, some not) I got it pretty close - and then a new version of the OS came out and broke everything. It took a few months before most of the tools I used were updated, and due to accessibility API changes some of them never did get updated.

> The whole selling point of Apple is that "it just works"

It does (generally) just work! However, it works they way they want you to use it.

That's fine for me and I usually am happy to adapt. It doesn't mean infinitely configurable.

it sort of reminds me of an interview someone did w/ a farmer's market vendor of gourmet jams/jellies....when they had a spread of 29-30 jams, no one bought any because it was too intimidating/confusion/bred indecision or whatever

They changed their lineup to 6 jams and sales went thru the roofff

Okay, except this is nothing like that. Computer programs can have defaults.

When you don't like the default, you go to the settings screen to change it. If you don't want to deal with settings, you never have to open up the screen.

But the scroll settings is much more annoying than that. Apple provides two completely independent settings for "Mouse" and "Trackpad". Under each, there is a toggle for scroll direction. If you toggle one, it magically and silently toggles the other as well.

That's not "simple", that's not "easy to use", that's 100% bad UX. If there's only one global setting, why present it as two independent options which are magically linked?

> Okay, except this is nothing like that. Computer programs can have defaults. When you don't like the default, you go to the settings screen to change it. If you don't want to deal with settings, you never have to open up the screen.

This is possible, but never as easy as it sounds when written down like that. Even when advanced settings are tucked away out of sight from regular users, at the kind of scale OS X or iOS operates in (or Linux, for that matter), there will be a non-negligible number of people who by accident or intent fool around with the advanced settings and get themselves into a state from which they lack the expertise to extricate themselves.

This is why Apple layer their own UX on top of Bluetooth, for example. And why many settings have no UX, you have to know the magic incantation to use in Terminal.

Again, I don't disagree, I'm just pointing out that "Making a boat for passengers AND for sailors" is a hard problem.

versus ubuntu where the kernel may be fine, but it's certainly nontrivial to bork some random config file or the nvidia/xwin/wayland configuration setup or some other part of the app layer on top of it, and rather than spend the next few hours trying to google whatever arcane setting it is, I've just thrown up my arms and wiped the drive and reinstalled the OS from scratch...

Don't get me wrong, I run ubuntu on a home fileserver/nas box but when I need it for some scientific computing package or something, the best way to run it is on top of Mac OS in a VM....

Maybe they should present it as one setting. But linking it makes sense for the vast majority of users. Because if it wasn’t you would see a flood of people asking why their mouse or trackpad is scrolling in the wring direction.

I‘m more and more convinced that the Apple way is the right way for the vast majority of users and deeper customization should only be available through the CLI or extensions.

> Okay, except this is nothing like that.

And yet… desktop Linux isn’t widely popular.

Probably because it's hard to come to a store and buy one.

Linux is “selling” a billion “jars of jam”, a different one for each person… Apple is “selling” like 6.

Why is this relevant? You probably know that Ubuntu is the most popular one. It should be enough to only offer this one.

Ubuntu’s customizability (valued by the article’s author) is Linux offering a billion jars of jam.

Default settings still exist and can be delivered just fine.

Original comment was “this is nothing like that”

I’m pointing out how this is like that.

How do you "zero mouse acceleration" people survive? I have three monitors side by side. If I went with zero mouse acceleration, I'd need a 3 meter wide mouse pad in order to be able to move the mouse cursor edge to edge! Or do you do that mouse bicycle move where you constantly pick the mouse up, bring it back to its original position, move it some more, pick it back up, and so on? Such a weird subculture :)

Way back in the late '90s and early '00s, lots of PC games with mouse look simply drew a window behind the game and placed the mouse cursor in the center. Every frame it would measure the distance the cursor traveled from center and reset it to poll for mouse movement. This meant that your OS mouse acceleration settings directly impacted how your mouse felt in game. If you've ever had a game glitch out and show a mouse cursor stuck in the middle of the screen, this is why.

Some of us who grew up playing these games got used to using Windows with no mouse acceleration. This is because it is easier to build muscle memory without it, since a certain distance traveled with the mouse will always produce the same camera movement in game regardless of how fast the mouse was moved.

How we deal with it? I think there are three factors, at least in my case;

1: Mouse sensitivity. I run my mouse at 1600 DPI, which is 2-4x higher than your typical typical cheap office mouse. I can zip across a large display pretty quick.

2: Fine motor skills. Years of Quake and other fast paced shooters have elevated my mouse accuracy above that of your typical computer user, allowing me to function on the desktop at a high mouse sensitivity.

3: On-the-fly DPI adjustments. My mouse has buttons for cycling through a number of sensitivity presets. I set mine to have 400, 800, and 1600 DPI. When something requires high mouse precision (such as photo editing) I turn the sensitivity down.

> 1: Mouse sensitivity. I run my mouse at 1600 DPI, which is 2-4x higher than your typical typical cheap office mouse. I can zip across a large display pretty quick.

I run my mouse at like 17000 DPI, then lower the sensitivity to compensate.

This gives me sub-pixel precision in FPS games.

Not that it helps much. I still have shit reaction times.

> 3: On-the-fly DPI adjustments. My mouse has buttons for cycling through a number of sensitivity presets. I set mine to have 400, 800, and 1600 DPI. When something requires high mouse precision (such as photo editing) I turn the sensitivity down.

Ahh, very interesting and very cool. That's the explanation I was looking for! Didn't realize mice had this feature or that OSes supported it.

Operating systems do not implicitly support this, but lots of mice do at the hardware level. They can be configured with software provided by the manufacturer, and usually support storing these configurations on the mouse itself so they can be used without any extra drivers or software running in the background or on operating systems not officially supported.

...by turning sensitivity up?

I don't understand how this is even a question. It's such an obvious answer.

My sensitivity is configured so that it takes about an inch and a half of mouse movement to move across one monitor.

But then you must be sacrificing small, precise movements. Assuming your monitor is 1920 pixels across, and your mouse's DPI is high enough, you'd need to move your mouse 1/1280 inches (or approximately 20μm) to move the cursor a single pixel. How does your hand physically move 20μm? If your 1.5 inches of movement spans a 4K monitor, then you need to move your mouse 10μm to move the cursor a single pixel.

EDIT: babypuncher's reply seems to address this using on-the-fly DPI adjustment. Pretty cool!

If you use a trackball you have actual momentum to help keep the cursor moving (and no mouse surface to worry about). I usually use pointer acceleration anyway because I find it’s more comfortable for me now to make smaller movements, but in the past I’ve used a flat profile and just flicked the trackball when I wanted my cursor on the other side of the screen.

Large mouse pads.

Growing up playing first person shooters has wired my mind to a degree that it's difficult to overcome the muscle memory. This makes mouse acceleration terribly frustrating. Fortunately, using a track pad with mouse acceleration doesn't use the same muscles and is much more bearable (if slower) to use.

Well the m1 only supports one external monitor so thats not much of an issue ;)

I use a Logitech G502 and I just like the high sensitivity. I don't need a huge trackpad or to pick up the mouse. When mouse movent maps 1:1 to pointer movement, your brain and muscle memory can do a much better job at fast & precise movement.

I used a total of three external monitors with the original m1, via a displaylink hub. Saying "m1 does not support it" is not accurate. Its not like a amd 3950x supports any external monitors, does it?..

If you want to be pedantic...

The Apple m1 is an SoC, not a CPU. It is not comparable to an AMD 3950X. It is perfectly reasonable to talk about the display capabilities of an SoC, because the GPU and display controllers are built into the SoC.

Apple themselves markets the macbook air as supporting:

> One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz[1]

And yes, I'm aware of the display link hacks. This works by emulating extra GPUs in software (VGC). The m1 supports multiple displays via display link in the same way MacOs runs Gnome via an Ubuntu VM.

[1] https://www.apple.com/macbook-air/specs/

If you want to be pedantic...

You mentioned the M1, which is an SoC, not a computer. So when you said the M1 only supports one external monitor, you were being vague and incorrect. The M1 Mac Air only supports one monitor, but the M1 Mac mini supports two. If you expand the M1 SoC to encompass both the Pro, Max and Ultra versions, you can connect 3, 4, and 5 displays respectively.

14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro: Two external displays at up to 6K over USB-C and one at up to 4K over HDMI 2.0

14-inch or 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Max: Three external displays at up to 6K over USB-C and one at up to 4K over HDMI 2.0

Mac Studio with M1 Max or M1 Ultra: Four displays at up to 6K over USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 and and one at up to 4K over HDMI 2.0

https://www.macworld.com/article/347919/how-many-monitors-ca...

Displaylink is not a hack. Its commercially supported. You buy a displaylink hub, you can pick up the phone and they will sort out your problems. The same tech is used, for years, to provide multimonitor support for laptops in corporate offices. This was always the surest way to allow all sorts of dell, lenovo and apple laptops to work with multimonitor setups. Its not without flaws, but it does work. Saying "m1 does not support more than one ext monitor" is misleading; it sure does, with the extra (and not necessairly cheap) accessory.

The 3950x isn't a GPU or APU. It doesn't support any display out because that's not it's job. The low end AMD laptop APUs natively drive 3-4 monitors.

The Mac Studio supports up to 5 monitors.

Very fancy mouse with tiny precision.

Hated that I couldn't flip scroll direction because I wanted the trackpad to be natural and mouse to be inverted. Found this: https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

The acceleration seems to scale with the mouse sensitivity setting. With the setting at 0 there is very little or no acceleration. You'd need a mouse with adjustable dpi setting to use it like that though.

I recently tried https://linearmouse.org/ and it seemed to offer both acceleration and sensitivity settings for mice.

That’s interesting, may be that’s why I feel it strange when operating a mouse on Windows/Linux?

Are there links to this acceleration? Thanks.