> main advantage over other systems is power management

I can understand that appeal.

In the last 5 years I don’t think I’ve had a windows laptop sleep or hibernate as I would expect, not randomly wake up in the middle of the night, in my bag, and just sit there fans at full speed…

I’m tired enough of it to try a Mac…

Same happens occasionally on my mac. And even if it doesn't stay on, it wakes up often enough to drain >50% overnight. My only machine to reliably sleep, wake up and power manage is Linux.

Did you turn off "powernap" in settings? By default, a mac would wake up to download mail, run backups, and do other things in the middle of the night.

Yeah, that's with powernap off.

I've experienced this with Mac laptops that I've got loads of stuff running on, but not on stock configurations, so I suspect it's some piece of software rudely waking it up every so often for its own inscrutable reasons.

My new M1 MBP runs out of battery over a 3 day weekend of sleeping without charge ( the only way to make it sleep is to disconnect the charger, otherwise it refuses, probably due to the external screen connected).

i'll counter your anecdotal data point with mine, my m1 stayed alive in sleep for 3 weeks while i was on holiday and had hours of battery life left when i opened it up.

Maybe we’re all doomed to just power off forever…

I bought a high-end lenovo and the fans would turn on and the machine would get hot when it was in my bag.

But it's not Microsoft's fault. The Surface Book I replaced it with works perfectly.

I had a problem like that a lot with my MBP. Except it would do it while fully closed, in an insulated sleeve, inside my backpack. Roasting hot. Just awful.

Yeah my Dell(s) have done that.

I reach inside and it is like a toaster “oh yeah this guy is dead…”

I've got bad news, I've been extremely unimpressed with my Macbook's so-called smart sleep. Literally the first day I brought it into work I went to go take it out of my bag only to find that it was too hot to touch. Neither selecting "Sleep" nor closing the lid for 30 minutes had convinced the fickle OS to enter a low-power state.

You know what Windows and Linux offer that Mac doesn't? A friggin' Hibernate option. Please, just let me have a button to power off my computer while persisting its state to disk. No, I don't want to have to shut down my computer every time I put it in a bag, that's completely ridiculous and an utter waste of my time having to reset all my tmux panes, vim windows, shell histories... what a UX nightmare. They've made a laptop that's a terror to actually take anywhere with you. Even when the "smart" sleep does (sometimes) finally decide to kick in, it invariably costs 20% of the battery.

When people say that Macs have good power management, what they mean is that Safari is optimized for power consumption relative to Chrome and Firefox.

Macs have a hibernate option that completely powers the machine off after saving the contents of RAM to disk, but you need to set it via the terminal. Find the current hibernate mode via: pmset -g

The default is hibernatemode 3 (RAM stays powered on until battery drops below some threshold, so that wake from sleep is very fast).

The version of “hibernate” you want is mode 25: sudo pmset -a hibernate mode 25

If you routinely keep your computer 'hibernating' for days at a time without plugging it in, you’ll save some battery life this way at the expense of a slower wake-up time because RAM is not kept powered.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pmset for more details.

> Safari is optimized for power consumption relative to Chrome and Firefox

This is a very big difference. Chrome has zero respect for battery life.

You have either a hardware issue (lid sensor), an SMC issue (try an SMC reset, it's painless), or software you run is preventing sleep (which you can find by looking in the Energy tab of Activity Monitor. Google search for "os x sleep prevented") or you have some hardware plugged in (external displays and keyboards can sometimes prevent a lid-shut from triggering sleep; I forget the 'rules' around this.)

Also, you can set the power manager's hibernatemode to your liking (Google search "os x hibernate mode") but there usually no reason to adjust the default (sleep for 3-4 hours, then suspend to disk) given how fast storage is in macs these days.

Macs have been famous for decades for having the best sleep/hibernate functions in the industry and when yours didn't work properly maybe you should have investigated? Or at least not be whinging about Apple over it?

> maybe you should have investigated?

I did / have on multiple devices.

Report a bug in Feedback Assistant.

>not randomly wake up in the middle of the night, in my bag, and just sit there fans at full speed…

At this point I always globally disable wake timers in Windows. They're mostly used for automatic updates. (For more fine-grained control, look at the various wake timers in Task Scheduler.)

My work Mac has certainly turned on in a bag overnight. No escape from that issue there, I'm sorry to say

We’re doomed.

> Their main advantage over other systems

is that some of us just really don’t like Windows and really like our Macs.

We’re not fanboys. It’s just a preference. Chocolate vs. vanilla, football vs. cricket, boys vs. girls.

There are some usability affordances in macos that are quite nice.

For example something as simple as copy and paste is command-c, everywhere.

In Ubuntu? control-c or control-shift-c. It is pretty annoying being in autopilot and killing the command line program you are in because you reflexively hit control-c.

Also, readline shortcuts work through out, so control-a will send you to the start of a line. Not with Ubuntu.

This is a common complaint, but this issue is that Mac users and Linux users basically talk past each other on this point. Just speaking for myself, I find that I accidentally kill a process in the Mac terminal whenever I try to copy anything because I can't keep Ctrl-C and Cmd-C separate (both Windows and Linux use Ctrl exclusively, which means you don't have to tell them apart).

If you're going to use Ctrl for shortcuts, you necessarily run into the issue needing a separate shortcut for copy in the terminal, because Ctrl-C has meant "send an interrupt signal to the process" since at least the 60s.

Fortunately, for people sufficiently annoyed by this, most Linux terminals do allow you to change keyboard shortcuts arbitrarily, so you can have unified copy shortcuts if you want. For a variety of reasons, I find this more trouble than it is worth and prefer sticking with the default.

The Linux way is to copy text anywhere just by selecting it and paste it with the middle mouse button.

it is the "primary" buffer, not clipboard.

macos also have it. that is part of application handling. iterm, alacritty, and bunch of other apps can behave the same. Including Xquartz.

> MacOS is one of the least technically sophisticated operating systems in common use

Having a driver for a given Ethernet controller is hardly a good proxy for sophistication…

I think I need to write a plugin that searches the current HN page for terms in a configurable flame fodder string list and adds `opacity: 0.2` to the row. Fanboy would definitely included by default.

I don't really care about my laptop being sophisticated as long as it doesn't crash.

Maybe let's wait until Windows allows scrolling of a non-active window before saying this.

Or moving/changing the name of a file while it's open.

Or having a slash in a file name.

Pretty sure that you can scroll non-active windows. Just tried it to be sure.

Wow, didn't realize thank you!

I still think being able to move/change the name of a file while it's open is impressive

Yes, works fine on Windows 11

Windows 10, too. I think it didn't work in Windows 7, though. If my memory is correct, that means that it's not a super-new feature, but still relatively newish.

Windows 10 (at least the first version) came out seven years ago. It's not even new anymore, it's well on its way to just becoming... old?

I guess my memory is somewhat skewed by having skipped across Windows 8, true.

As a Linux user, why would you want a slash in a filename?

Because a very large fraction of people - greater than 90% - use forward slashes in dates, and people like putting dates in filenames.

Nearly all of those people have never seen a filename path written out in text, and wouldn't care if they did.

> Because a very large fraction of people - greater than 90% - use forward slashes in dates

Citation needed

A forward slash is a very common separator character.

I did this myself the other week. Mac user. Folder was called ‘Lessons/episodes’ from memory. I only noticed it was weird when my Synology didn’t display the character. Renamed to ‘Lessons & episodes’.

It absolutely is. That doesn't mean that 90% of the world population use forward slashes for dates.

MacOS has really strong userland software, stuff like the Quartz compositor is genuinely quite hard to beat (neither Windows, x11 nor Wayland can live up to it's featureset and stability).

However, MacOS as an operating system really is a mess. Especially the XNU kernel, which is still an unbelievable amalgamation of disagreeing technology. Remember, MacOS is not natively a UNIX-certified machine: all of it's UNIX compatibility comes from a BSD-based compatibility layer that hasn't really been changed since the late-90s. Oh, and the coreutils? Notoriously garbage. MacOS ships with all sorts of outdated, downgraded, vulnerable and otherwise broken shell utilities. pico instead of nano, zsh instead of modern bash... hell, even something as simple as installing git is a 700mb installation with a mandatory reboot.

I'll give MacOS credit where credit is due (Apple had good design philosophies in the 2010s), but the actual operating system (see: functional network of software components) is truly awful, arguably just as bad as Windows if not worse. Just about it's only redeeming qualities are the things that Apple didn't make (like pf and process management. If you forced me to pick something that I found impressive, I'd have to choose Grand Central Dispatch, but even that isn't terribly impressive. It's mostly as if some Apple engineers decided to iterate on the fairly lackluster Linux process management. It would have been a miracle if they managed to make something worse.

> even something as simple as installing git is a 700mb installation with a mandatory reboot

Mandatory reboot? I've never experienced that with the Xcode command line tools.

I could be wrong, last time I seriously used MacOS (for both personal/work uses) was Mojave. Either way, it's installing a lot more than just the 30mb of the git binary, so I learned my lesson and just installed all the GNU stuff with my package manager. Annoying to be sure, but somehow better than dealing with Apple's default way of handling it.

Yeah, brew requires the CLT because it’s built on git, so I assumed that’s what you were talking about.

> pico instead of nano, zsh instead of modern bash

nano is a GNU clone of pico. pico is OG nano.

bash was replaced with zsh because Apple purged their OS of all GPL3 software (including nano).

Mach 2 (and thus XNU) was built on BSD 4, which was derived directly from Bell Labs UNIX V7. It has been “natively UNIX” as long as the other ancient V7 and SysV derivatives, like AIX and SunOS.

Maybe what you really mean is you don’t like UNIX and expect it to work like Linux?

Yes, Linux is better than any certified Unix and that's one of the big reasons macOS is worse for Unix-like things than Linux.

No doubt my dude, but thats not the point. BSD in MacOS is not a 'compatibility layer'

When CMU made Mach, it was a BSD OS. When Next made NextStep on top of Mach, it was a BSD OS. When Apple made OSX with NextStep, it was still BSD.

You seem to be under the impression that because you haven’t looked up if anything’s changed since 2010, nothing has.

The command line tools (except GPL ones) do get updated from FreeBSD and there’s nothing “non-native” about how the kernel works.

Switching to gnu coreutils is trivial on a Mac.

Plenty of scripts will break in mysterious ways if you replace the sed binary with GNU sed.