And curiously enough, this was the moment she converted to being an Apple user. She expected and found the same quality on her Mac as she did on her iPhone.

> There isn’t another computing hardware company which doesn’t have a “hot garbage” tier of products.

There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s. A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga. What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.

>There were many more vertically integrated software-hardware PC companies in the 80s.

>A true shame that some of the others didn't survive; I'd love to be writing this message on my 2022 Acorn RISC PC or Amiga.

>What we witness now is the end result of the Wintel monopoly.

A great point, BeOS was basically the last attempt anybody had at creating a new desktop OS, and when it failed, so did the last vestiges of anybody else's appetite for trying again.

I love my Mac, but really enjoyed GEM on my Atari ST too.

And people wonder why I still hold a grudge against Microsoft. We still live with the consequences of three decades of bad behavior. A little deathbed conversion doesn’t mean as much as some think it does.

Is OSX on average more reliable than Windows though?

I've never had much experience with it but heard some stories about its bad backward compatibility and not-too-pleasant upgrades. Thinking about finally getting a Macbook instead of my current Linux/Windows dual boot since Macs have the unique combination of professional-grade display, very powerful hardware and full support of proprietary apps that I need. And I mostly dislike Apple UX choices.

> Is OSX on average more reliable than Windows though?

I would say yes, but perhaps the worst-of-worst stories in this thread are prejudicing me. Things like in this thread don't happen on OX though.

(I honestly don't know what you're referring to about "bad backwards compatibility")

But if you mostly dislike Apple UX choices, you probably are going to mostly dislike using it as a daily machine, so.

The "Backwards compatibility" issue is an interesting one. For years, companies like Adobe used OSX upgrades as an excuse to force paid upgrades. Hardware manufactures did (still do?) this with Windows drivers. The other side is that Apple deprecated 32bit support around 2011, dropping it in 2019/20. They've also introduced and deprecated a few frameworks in this time. They have always announced well ahead of time. People get caught short by not paying attention.

With regards to OS upgrades, there has always been a vocal minority that likes to complain, ever since the System 7 days, sometimes not without reason but it's minor. Overall, the upgrades are decent, but I'll agree it's not always plain sailing for everyone. The thing with macOS is last year's Lemon is next year's gold. Rose tinted glasses are abundant online, especially with competing OSs.

> Is OSX on average more reliable than Windows though?

In my personal, anecdotal experience, macos is more reliable than windows. Neither is as reliable as my 14-year-old but constantly updated and fresh today Gentoo/Linux install. But the things that a laptop needs, macos is better. So I have a macbook and a Gentoo/Linux workstation and I generally feel like I get the best of both worlds.

I also often just run a debian in qemu on my macbook rather than installing a bunch of software from macports or homebrew, which has worked very nicely.

OSX doesn’t surprise me in hostile ways

That sounds like it was a bug / mistake than a deliberate decision by the company unless I misunderstood something?

Information about every executable your run on "your" laptop goes to a special server belonging to Apple. It must be a huge and costly mistake...

But it is.

No it isn’t. Most apple users rely on apple to protect them from threats.

The best security you can get is in prison. I wonder why people don't want to go there. /s

You can implement malware check in many ways. This one is the worst; it also introduces a huge attack surface.

Yes, it is. I used to be very into windows but after the same upgrade issue (they just swapped me up without asking for permission and ruined some projects I had), along with how annoying it was to deal with different vendors, driver issues, I just said it wasn't worth my time and I wasn't enjoying tinkering there.

Mac has been great. My 2015 MBP is still going strong, it was many updates behind and I resisted for a while but I eventually just upgraded to the latest (2-3 major versions) and it went perfectly smoothly.

Every company and ecosystem will have its quirks. But some are way more hostile than others, and I've never seen that level of hostility from apple (yet).

Ports can be annoying though but I'd rather take minor annoyances over big problems like this.

BTW -- one of the bigger problems with the forced Win10 upgrade was that it changed the UI / icons and for older folks caused a lot of grief, because they felt lost on top of everything else.

I have not reinstalled MacOS since I bought my laptop, 5 years ago. And before that it was the same with another 5 year old laptop. These laptops feel pretty snappy still.

I bought a secondary laptop - a 12 inch Macbook Pro - and it took a few hours to set up. I didn't have to turn a bunch of things off. I didn't have to find the button that wouldn't send my entire life to a tech company. Just a few clicks and done. It's decently fast for such an old, underpowered machine, too.

For the most part, the OS gets out of the way.

Absolutely. I've owned many machines and driven two Mac OSX, basically every Windows since 3.1, Linux Mint, Ubuntu 14.4-20.4, and several generations of Android. OSX for me wins reliability and user experience, hands-down. XP service pack 2 is probably my favorite Windows experience, followed by 7. Linux is nice for control but not winning any awards for stability or smooth updates (headless/cli is fine, but GUI linux desktops are always a bit buggy).

I have a Macbook Air from 2008 that's still going strong.

I have Windows machines that do all the weird things people are posting in this thread.

Windows is a bother of epic proportions compared to MacOS. It's not even close.

fine, but vulnerable. Windows 10 works on 2008 machine.

The big thing to remember is that Apple owns the entire stack. This has good and bad parts but one thing it means is that they can’t play support games where Dell and Microsoft point fingers saying it’s the other one’s fault, and because they make revenue after the initial sale Apple doesn’t have the same incentive to push you to buy new hardware every year or two. This thread started with some crapware Lenovo bundled to get another revenue stream, which Apple doesn’t need to do and knows would hurt their reputation.

MacOS (which is what it's called now, OS X name got retired) will annoy you, changes annoy people, but if you buy an Apple product it'll actually work for quite a few years. Not 15, unless you're unusual, they're not supported that long. If you want your software or hardware accessories to be supported forever, they won't be. If you have really opinionated positions on how something will function forever, you'll be disappointed.

But out of the box it works. Hard crashes are very rare. User hostile things like forced updates don't happen.

The worst things are much much less likely to happen than with hardware that runs Windows, and if something happens the tech support at Apple stores is pretty good. If you want a good Windows machine you have to do extensive research to figure out how not to get crap, and you still end up wrong sometimes. If your grandma wants a computer, you can just tell her to go to an Apple store and get whatever she wants and it'll work.

It wasn't that many months ago that I had a conversation with a customer that if they wanted to continue to use email (outside the browser) then the best option was to buy a new mac because their current mac version don't support the new certificates required for modern tls and in order to get a new macos version they need to buy a new device.

If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?

My 2015 MacBook Air just got the newest MacOS update.

Edit: I was wrong, macos 12 was the last one for 2015 Airs. Not bad though. It will still get Safari and security updates though.

They may have bought it 5 years ago, but it wasn't 5 years old. Also for future reference you can update the certs on older OS X versions to get a few more years out of a system for someone thats happy with it: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/422332/how-do-i-up...

An interesting hack. We went with a different hack to accomplish a working solution, but good to know there is alternatives.

The idea in the link is that one transfer the System Root certificates from another (more modern) Mac to which the customer should already own. In theory I guess we as a email provider could continuously buy the latest version of mac and use that as the transfer host (hopefully do not transferring any account specific certificates). It must work without any corner cases (not overwriting anything on the customer end), the script need to work in future macos versions, and the assumption is that the first group of certificates is the relevant ones, and that it doesn't break anything on the customer end.

For those who has not read the link, this do not update the System Roots keychain since users are not allowed to do that in macos. Instead this adds a trustRoot certificate. A nice trick. One of the comments say that it didn't fix the problem for them but who know what their situation was.

Yep. My wife's still running a MBP from 2012 that I think finally got its last update to Big Sur (released 2020) without issue.

Looking at the compatibility charts, everything from 2015 on-ward supports Monterey (2021, the latest version). The last laptop that couldn't update past El Capitan was 2009. As far as Macbooks (non-pro), last one stuck on El Capitan is the 2009 model as well.

And it's not even that Apple broke anything on the 13 year old laptop, it's just that the rest of the world moved on and they're no longer fixing it.

My old Macbook is 9 years old. It has no issues what so ever with browsing the web.

The customer must be running some truly ancient version of Mac OS for this story to be true.

email is not the same as the web. HTTPS seem a bit more permissible than smtp/imap. That said I know that some banking sites do reject old version of browsers on the basis of security.

Some providers (email and others) can also continue to support deprecated/broken security for a very long time in order to not having to deal with customers using old deprecated software. 512 bits RSA public keys for example was used a very long time, long past where different standards and recommendation had a much higher minimum. Algorithm and key attacks are quite rare so companies can keep a low security standard for many years/decades before anyone exploits it. For customers that could be seen as a positive or a negative depending on perspective.

Weird, my MBP from 2015 runs fine. Don't think I have ever updated the OS either.

I use my 2012 MacBook Pro and 2022 MacBook Pro interchangeably to publish my blog etc. with zero problems.

> If I remember right their mac-thing was around 5 years old?

My 2015 MacBook still runs absolutely fine.

For that matter, I'm considering (but probably not) buying a new iPad to replace my TEN YEAR OLD iPad that I'm still using every single day, as it can no longer update to the latest iPad OS.

But my 7 year old (soon 8 years old) laptop is as good as the first day I bought it.

My 2010 Macbook still works fine after I've updated the expired X3 certificate [0].

[0]: https://macresearch.org/dst-root-ca-x3-expired-mac/

My 2012 MBP that I'm using to write this piped up to disagree. It retrieves mail from a variety of sources every day, including work email, and there is never a problem. All using the stock Mail app that comes with the OS. So I'm guessing some details are being mis-remembered by the 2nd-hand information supplied by a person who doesn't sound technically-inclined enough to have gotten the story right in the first place.

IOW, if one is to supplied anecdotal data, probably best to make sure it's your anecdote, maybe?

I would, if Apple would just make a MacBook w/ a stylus --- I don't want the hassle of multiple devices, but I'm not willing to give up a stylus --- at this point, I'm considering just breaking down and getting a Mac Mini and Wacom Cintiq Pro 16 and giving up portability/battery.

What applications do you want to use a stylus with? iPads are really good at what they do, and Apple makes integration with their laptops straightforward. You can easily share files back and forth.

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you could use an iPad as an external display with the Apple Pencil, but I haven’t researched that.

Yeah, so Sidecar is free for owners of recent-ish iPads and Macs.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210380

Luna Display is a more premium option.

https://astropad.com/luna-display-vs-apple-sidecar/

Carbide Create and Macromedia Freehand are the major stumbling blocks.

The former isn't available for the iPad, the latter predates it, and I find the nearest analogue, Serif's Affinity Designer not quite right.

I also like having access to a file system, and the ability to run arbitrary opensource tools such as OpenSCAD and OpenSCAD Graph Editor and RapCAD.

No, that is why people turn to Linux (and *BSD to a much (, much) smaller extent) after having been thoroughly disgusted by these practices whether they come from Microsoft (Windows et al) or Apple or anyone else. It is the only "platform" where you can be really free from this type of behaviour. They first install it on the hardware previously used for Windows or Mac OS and quickly find out their old hardware could perform much better than it did when burdened by those marketing strategies disguised as operating systems. The next step comes when they buy new hardware on which they directly install some Linux distribution, usually keeping the factory-installed Windows or Mac OS around where it tends to languish. When they then decide to boot into those factory images they are immediately hit with the upgrade hammer which only increases their determination to stay away from those systems as much as possible. This is easier for those who used to run Windows than for those who need to use Mac OS to develop for one of the other Apple brands since these all mandate the use of Xcode [1] which needs Mac OS which "needs" [1] Apple hardware.

[1] as in "is only licenced for", there are ways out of this...