> 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.