From what hardware POV you are correct, I wish though Apple would adopt Carbon Magnesium chasis that thinkpad uses. For same 16inch size, Thinkpad is noticeably lighter. I can happy lug my P1 Gen5(16 inch) model anywhere, whereas 16inch macbook pro is hefty.
Under that configuration I've found 32GB to be just within the limit of usability. 16GB are just not enough. Also, for some virtualized Docker workflows, there is that known issue of slow File interaction through the Mac/virtualized file system, which makes working with say Magento, Drupal or simlar software REALLY slow.
As a comparison, I've also got a 2011 intel MacBookPro with 16GB RAM. That one is running Linux Mint. Docker performance is almost transparent, and the system runs pretty snappy for development.
How do these sound to you?
I honestly don't know how Active Directory got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not Windows.
I honestly don't know how Final Cut Pro got so popular when it sucks so much on anything that is not OS X.
The population that uses Active Directory lives almost exclusively on Windows.
The population that uses FCP lives almost exclusively on MacOS (OSX is dead, long live OSX)
The population that uses Docker does not live exclusively on Linux. In fact, a minority of developers works on Linux laptops, even when they target it for deployment. It's a larger minority than in other sectors, but it's definitely a minority, not even a relative majority. The population of (web) developers is possibly the most evenly-distributed of all, in terms of OS.
If someone was trying to run FCP on an OS X VM on a linux box, what would you tell them?
It's not the fault of docker or linux containers that people insist on trying to use the technology on another unsupported operating system.
Obviously, it's the fault of people - as I said in the comment above: I'm surprised it got so popular among people, considering how much it sucks on the platforms lots of them use.
The whole idea of using Docker for dev boxes is to eliminate the cross platform dependency issues and make it easier for everyone, without maintaining wikis for each OS version. We don't use Docker at work because of the non-Linux performance issues.
Running the docker daemon in a linux VM on your OS X system and then complaining about performance is silly.
With that said, the air is nice. It’s just not worth it to save 160 grams for my use case.
I will say that a lot of the software I run in Docker has an aarch64 bundle... there are a few things that don't. There's now a beta version of Docker Desktop that includes Rosetta support, which should dramatically help for x86_64 images. I also have found that the FS I/O is not great, but getting better.
(prior job was using M1 Max, current is windows+wsl)
The new 14" model is only slightly bigger than the 13" (.4"x.4" bigger and .5lb heavier) and supports up to 96GB of RAM so may be a reasonable consolation if those size and weight compromises are tolerable for you. Additionally, you'd get a better screen, keyboard, more ports, better wifi and bluetooth, and more CPU & GPU capacity. Of course cost will also go up quite a bit.
It would also help if the virtualization story on Macs improved so that you wouldn't need to have all that RAM just to compensate.
More details here to avoid spamming this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34374176
- No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al)
- Built-in package manager
- Having (relative) parity between production and development
Between those three, you probably couldn't pay me to go back to MacOS. Adding my own package manager, disabling ads and making my Mac into a Linux-equivalent machine is possible, but it's a lot of work to maintain and set up.
If I was a creative and used Adobe/Microsoft tools, I might be a little nicer to MacOS. As a programmer though? I haven't felt the desire to use a Mac since Mojave existed.
The Linux built in package manager is only ok. It often lags behind in versions of things I need. I ended up using Homebrew on both Mac and Linux. For the cases the Linux built-in package manager is too out of date I use Homebrew. It's not perfect on either system.
> - Having (relative) parity between production and development
For certain classes of development this is a big deal.
For my container work it doesn't really matter. I'm running Rancher Desktop and doing container based dev in the VM. Windows, Linux, or Mac doesn't matter as the host.
> - No nagware (no Apple Music pop-ups, advertisements for safari, login nag in settings, et. al)
I must have learned to ignore this as I've had Macs for a couple decades now.
On the flip side, a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux. I think this is the biggest problem for GNU/Linux as a general OS. There's some biz software that just doesn't run there.
Homebrew is down-right bad. There are certainly worse Linux package managers (pacman... looking at you), but if you're using MacOS I'd highly recommend giving Nix a try. Less muss-and-fuss, and stopped me from sending my Macbook on a swim in the local river.
> For my container work it doesn't really matter.
That's fine, it doesn't really for me either. The nice part (for me) is the native Docker and fantastic filesystem support. Whereas MacOS feels like a product I'm turning into a tool, Linux systems tend to feel like a tool out-of-box. Different strokes for different folks though, it really just depends on what you want out of a computer.
> I must have learned to ignore this
I must have learned to appreciate living without it, then. It's pretty jarring returning to a monetized OS like Windows 11 or Monterey for me.
> a lot of business software I must use for work isn't available on Linux
Oh yeah, for sure. Like I said in my previous comment, I wouldn't use Linux if I was a lawyer or a video editor. That being said though, pretty much everything I've used in the modern enterprise is browser-based. You don't need a native Jira app or a custom .DMG to run git. Arguably, everything you need is shipped right with most Linux distros.
I won't (and haven't) argued that Linux is perfect, but MacOS is converging with the Windows and Google school of desktop design. It worries me, and it's part of why I left MacOS in the first place. Photoshop is nice, but living on a computer that feels like a rented hotel room isn't very satisfying to me. Again, different strokes.
Curious why? I used to dabble with it and others.
A few macs ago (maybe around 2017), I switched to a strategy of “either the AppStore or brew”. I’ve never had a problem with anything from brew since. I install some productivity tools, standard OS tooling (Inkscape, Gimp, Libre), everything I need to develop for Python, Android, various embedded arm platforms, Elixir/Erlang. I even add some extra tools for Swift development.
It's a bit like comparing cakes. Homebrew is a frosted sheet cake, whereas Macports is that nice double-layer box mix your mom used to make. Nix is a coconut-dusted 6-layer wedding cake that hides a 10 course meal under the fondant. They're all delicious, but I have a hard time going back to the sheet cake nowadays.
No such thing. What distributions did you have experience with? And what distributions are you running on your production systems?
I’d also not be opposed to a package manager more geared towards making sure things work without fuss than trying to reduce redundancy. I don’t really mind if there’s multiple versions of whatever lib installed if that’s what it takes. Storage is cheap, my patience isn’t.
In theory flatpak and such should meet that need, but the implementation is so much more quirky and troublesome compared to e.g. Mac application bundles.
I do this on NixOS (and used Nix to do the same thing on MacOS). It's really great, but the up-front work of configuring everything can be a bit steep. The end result is pretty nice though - your environments are all sym-linked together from a common package store, and you can group together certain environments/package sets to update independently of one another. The icing on the cake is the rollback feature, where you can go back through the generations of your environment (until the packages get GCed).
It's not perfect (and it would test your patience), but Nix is an interesting commitment to the philosophy of using as much disk space as possible. I'm hopeful that someday it will be the de-facto package manager for Mac systems.
I have a Macbook Air M1 2020 and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th Gen (4 years old!) running Linux Mint.
I have upgraded the Thinkpad's Battery, RAM (16GB), and SSD (500GB) for the cost of the parts. I will not be able to do that on the Macbook. Ever.
For what I do (browsing, videos, some writing and research) the only benefit to the Macbook is slightly better battery life. I have more software option on the Thinkpad for sure and it does not want to control everything I do.
I paid WAY less for the thinkpad and I get pretty much the same performance for my needs.
The THRUTH is that most people are being way oversold computing power and paying a premium for it because they are locked into the platform.
And just yesterday for some reason Safari vanished and re-arranged my bookmarks for no reason.
Getting my MacBook ready to sell as a matter of fact.
In my mind it is stupid (and poor marketing) that the linux community is not crushing Apple with cheap, fast laptops.
That is not how the economics of laptops work.
Most people don't want a Linux laptop. Call it inertia, but it is a fact that most people buy Windows laptops.
Most of the premium market consumers prefer Apple.
And most people who prefer Linux aren't paying a premium right now.
So you have three sets that do not overlap, and there is nothing the community can do about that in the short to medium term, anyway.
On my old MBP I get regularly nagged to update to Monterey. Despite it not being supported.
On my iPhone it wouldn't stop nagging me to accept changes to the iCloud T&Cs. There was no permanent opt out. You could say no for a bit and then it would go back to nagging you.
Same with Apple Music.
Currently my iPhone nags me to disable background running of Garmin Connect, so that I loose integration with my Garmin watch.
None of this endears Apple to me and is definitely a consideration for my next purchase.
I really miss the desktop environments available on Linux. KDE is great, and even Gnome beats MacOS. You can't even move windows between desktops with a keyboard shortcut on MacOS. The desktop experience on MacOS is a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. E.g. Popup dialogues will rearrange your windows (e.g. if the popup is wider than your window, to remain centered, it will move the underlying window and I'm not joking.) E.g. Mouse acceleration can't be turned off, which makes MacOS pretty awful for any mouse-centric workflows. E.g. Blocking animations that fundamentally can't be turned off.
That's on top of things that aren't necessarily faults with MacOS, such as getting used to different keyboard shortcuts.
On Linux, I get native Docker, up-to-date coreutils (they're different on MacOS), more precompiled versions of software I use, and having the Linux desktop software that I prefer. (Finder is frustrating, Gedit or Kate for text editing is great, GIMP is much nicer on Linux, etc.) I also miss KDEConnect.
I don't use Xcode, but as I understand, updating it messes with git and python.
But the battery life really is amazing enough to make it worth it. I'm really excited for Asahi to progress to a point that I'm comfortable using it.
https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/move-frontmost-window-to...
My biggest gripe with Mac OS X is the window manager. I want to be able to ALT+right-click anywhere on a window to be able to move it around, alt+left-click anywhere on a window to resize it. I want to be able to click the dock icon for an app I'm using and have the most recently used window of that app come to the foreground instead of however it makes that decision. I'd love to get preview thumbnails of windows when hovering over icons in the doc so that I can select the window I want. Right-click plus reading window titles takes longer to find the window I need.
I want to be able to customize my fonts because I have a hard time reading text on my QHD external monitor.
I want a terminal that doesn't suck (and yes I use iterm2, it still sucks because I can't quickly jump to the end / beginning of a line to edit a command).
I want to be able to select text to copy to clipboard and use my middle mouse button to paste and I want that to work for all programs.
I want to be able to hold ctrl plus use the mouse wheel to zoom in / out of web pages on chrome ... something Linux and Windows both do out of the box but it just doesn't work on Mac OS X.
I want to be able to customize all of this and not feel like I'm locked in to "the Apple way" of doing things.
I lot of this is just familiarity and getting really used to a particular DE over decades of use and taking little things for granted. If all you've ever used is a Mac then I'm sure you've figured out how to be hyper-productive on that DE. I just find it strange that, from a company that somehow positioned itself as UX leaders ... I find that I'm 1/10th as productive on my work Macbook as I am on any nix device (and while Mac might use a heavily modified NetBSD kernel IIRC and have zsh and bash ... it feels very different from a nix machine to me).
Hold keys and click to move a window: https://mmazzarolo.com/blog/2022-04-16-drag-window-by-clicki.... I love it. Bind it to a mouse button with USB Overdrive for extra convenience.
In the terminal, use emacs-style bindings like ctrl-A and ctrl-E to move to the beginning and end of lines. On the Mac, Home and End are for beginning and ends of documents.
Use USB Overdrive or Steermouse to bind mouse buttons to whatever you want, including Paste. Select-to-copy might be impossible, though you could certainly do select-and-click-to-copy.
Cheers!
It's like using Arch Linux, except the software costs money, is proprietary, and people choose Arch because they would prefer their own config over the comforts and defaults provided by other distros.
Configuring a MacOS machine might require spending over $100 on usability software, providing personal information to a myriad of companies (Tools like IINA or iTerm2 are the exception and not the default.), and even after all that you still have a variety of unfixable usability issues.
KeyboardMaestro is $36 and BetterTouchTool is $22. With KeyboardMaestro, it's not clear what the license is (which makes it concerning for use in the workplace.)
> For almost every missing feature or annoyance in Macos, someone else has had the same thought and developed a solution.
I do appreciate the effort, but this isn't true. You can no longer disable blocking animations in MacOS, there is no Spaces API for instantly moving a window from one desktop to another, etc. And any of this can break with a MacOS update, and there's no easy way to automatically configure a fresh install. (IME, MacOS users use Time Machine backups rather than a fresh-install bash script.)
From someone used to the comforts of Linux, MacOS takes a huge amount of effort and expenditure to only get 20% of the way there.
You summed it up nicely!
Sadly even with all the apps like hammerspoon, tiling wms and others, there are lots of stuff you can't customize in the macOS environment.
There is no counterpart for Hammerspoon/KeyboardMaestro for macOS and AutoHotkey for Windows in Linux.
That said, that makes sense. I don't have experience with AHK or HammerSpoon, but I'd expect this functionality to be very dependent on the display server and overall desktop environment.
I also don't have to worry (or at least I think that I don't) that the Linux kernel or my distro silently introduces a hack for their programs to bypass my firewall and VPN because they couldn't fix some bugs by the company-mandated release date:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apple-nixes-...
1. I had hard time fighting openssl installed by Homebrew and getting Python to use it. On Linux - this is never an issue. In general IMO using homebrew is fairly tedious.
2. Debugging of stuff running on Linux. Sometimes logging is not enough and while remote debugging can be made to work (I mainly use Goland), it is pretty fiddly and does not work reliably.
I am not new to Mac or anything tbh. I used to use Mac about 5 years ago exclusively and then Linux for next 5 years and now using Mac again. IMO for kind of work I do - Linux is just leaps ahead of Mac.
Some window manager in linux are more like window manager frameworks, like AwesomeWM, that lets you customize its behavior via lua scripting. It's extremely powerful and allows you to get exactly the behavior you want.
But this part of linux is pretty niche stuff for sure though haha.
I wouldn't say I'm more productive thanks to this, but I'm way happier using a system I can set up so that it behaves how I want, instead of having to follow rules I don't agree with and can't change.
- desktop environment that is either sane (i.e. doesn't center align panels with variable number of controls like dock does) or can be customized
- keyboard without missing buttons, with actual button travel yet not touching the screen when closed
- option of a screen that doesn't double as mirror
I upgraded from the 13" M1 Air to the 14" MacBook Pro M1 Max
While Blender performance (rendering especially) is much faster, I sorely miss the MacBook Air's portability. The 14" is built like a brick. Compile times are faster, video editing is nicer with more RAM in the Pro, but it's a really tough call given just how different the weight is
I did love the M1 Air though! Probably the best laptop I've ever used pound-for-pound.
Of course if you need to have your laptop be x64 to match cloud architecture then that's different. Or you could just use ARM in the cloud and save even more carbon emissions.
First, it's great to hear from Real World people like you about their Asahi Linux experience. It sounds like the baseline is done and now they will pick away at the remaining pieces.
Real question: What is the driver for Asahi Linux to exist at all? Please don't think I am trolling when I ask this question. At 10,000ft, any sane person would say: "Why? It's Apple. Let them do them: Mac OS X." I expect Asahi Linux folks to reply: "Well, duh: Because."
Is it unlocking the insane performance per watt of Apple Mx chips for Linux?
Is it enabling the world's greatest laptops for Linux?
Is it the pure technical challenge of reverse engineering a closed hardware system?
Is it everything?
I am really curious to hear what people think.
This has been the world we've had since the concept of "IBM compatible" existed. Some people prefer Windows (because of available software, or ease of use) and some people prefer Linux (e.g. for efficiency, customisability or desire to run open source software). Why should that choice be tied to whether you've bought, HP, Lenovo or another manufacturer?
Apple has made some amazing laptop hardware, but Mac OS doesn't suit everyone. So well done to the Asahi Linux team for trying to take us back to that world of choice.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, but Apple's foray into broadly standard hardware is the exception for them. Sadly.
...almost 20 years?
Ideally it should run everywhere but in my experience you'll never get a positive Linux Desktop experience unless you tailor your hardware purchases to the Linux world - this usually means choosing a laptop that tons of other linux users are using, so the bugs are getting found and fixed, and documentation exists.
The key here is that it should at least run on the most popular laptop brands. It should run on Macbook Pro because it's incredibly popular hardware choice for software/technical people.
I only use the Macbook Pro. The speed, battery life, coolness (to the touch), and quietness make it extremely difficult to have any desire to pick up the ThinkPad.
But I'd still be more productive with Linux.
The fact that Asahi is such a popular project is a pretty strong indicator of how much room for improvement MacOS has, to put it as politely as I can. Personally, I wouldn't even consider buying a new Mac if there wasn't any good alternate native OS available.
Also, their ARM laptop is only available with Windows.
Screen was a bit better in most ways, keyboard was massively better, and the 16” was lighter (barely) than my 14”.
That said, I ran Win11 (my work environment requires Win) and MacOS is a straight upgrade to that IMO.
I do miss that machine though.
Using Mint, Elementary or whichever GUI distribution you would like to use with the Linux kernel has completely different tradeoffs in terms of GUI, which implies different productivity levels.
There is more. Even with the best case scenario you need to customise the GUI much more than you need to customise MacOS, for example energy management is a bit a of problem for most Linux based distros.
This simply happens because Apple owns the whole vertical from HW to GUI and they focus on the user. They have done this for decades. There is no such entity in the non-Apple world and this means there is more work for the user when trying to create a working environment.
Lenovo would crush Apple if it partnered with the Linux Community and made a cheap (in price!) everyday laptop for the consumer and focused on privacy and no lock in.
No it wouldn’t.
Users (the 99%) don’t care about privacy, tech, etc. They happily give their data up to TikTok (the CCP), Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc. The Snowden revelations were met with a shrug or “I have nothing to hide”. This is well beyond established at this point (these platforms have billions of users).
They also don’t care about lock in - they just want stuff that works and adds as much as it can to their lives in as little effort as possible. The Apple ecosystem is incredibly successful because it does this exceedingly well. They view lock in as a positive - “All my stuff just works together - here’s more money Apple”.
The average person cares as much and is as involved in all of this as I am in understanding how my light switch is related to the function and operation of a nuclear reactor. The amount of care, time, thought, and energy I put into that is the cumulative total of the three seconds I spend interacting with light switches everyday.
I’m not disparaging users. I use the nuclear reactor analogy because I don’t care, I don’t need to care, and I shouldn’t have to care. I, (like most people) have only so much bandwidth for time, energy, and passion. I leave worrying and caring about all of that up to everyone from the people who mine uranium to the electrician that wires up the switches.
On HN we're the uranium miners, nuclear physicists, power companies, linemen, and electricians. We're the few people who do know and care about any of this "tech stuff".
Probably the biggest myth about Apple these days, that it just works. Can I tell you the countless hours I have spent helping friends with their Apple and iPhone issues?
And besides, as technicians, our job is to GET PEOPLE to care about this stuff and lead by example. What good is trying to convince someone to not use Apple products if you are buying the latest Apple product?
And in my opinion, Google products "just work" much better and are more open to multiple routes of access to your data. At that, they are way better than Apple.
As the "tech guy" for most non-tech savvy people in my life I can count on fingers the number of times anyone has asked me for help with their Apple products. For the most part I look around and see people easily and happily using their Air Pods, iPhones, iPads, iWatches, and Mac Books.
Yes there are occasional minor issues and bugs but everyone knows to do a little dance of "turn it off, turn it back on", disconnect and reconnect, etc. Just like when I get in my car occasionally, I turn it on, and the infotainment display is wonky. I shut the car off, open the door, turn it back on, and say "Hmm, that was weird". Then I move on with my day. I simply won't accept that these kinds of occasional minor issues don't exist in the Google/Android ecosystem.
In the rare occasion something more significant has come up with Apple products and it's not a five minute or less fix I point them to the Apple Store and let them deal with it. Where's the equivalent for Google, Android, etc? I don't want to get into yet another tired Apple v Android "debate" here on HN but (for me) that's reason enough for me to recommend Apple products for most people.
As far as access to data, again, they don't care. How many GDPR or other requests do you think Facebook has gotten for dumps of people's data? I'm sure it's 1% or less of their user base. Again, as long as people can sign-in to their iCloud account that counts as "access to their data" to them.
It's perfectly fine if you see part of our role is evangelizing these things. For me I don't want to be "that guy" who's a half-step from the cryptobro cousin at Thanksgiving trying to get everyone to buy bitcoin. I'll occasionally drop things like "Oh Tiktok, say hi to China for me" or "If the service is free it's because you're the product" but I avoid harping and evangelizing. To use my power analogy I wouldn't walk into someone's house and start talking about how they should really be using Cree bulbs or Leviton switches. If someone has interest and wants to get into getting big tech out of their life, Linux, or XYZ light bulbs and power switches more power to them but I'm not going to push.
I don't think any amount of education or preaching I'd do is going to get someone to switch from Android to Apple (or vice-versa), Windows/Mac to Linux, pull Alexa out of their house, cancel their social media accounts, etc. Plus, just like crypto, if they do follow my advice I'll get to hear all about it in the event anything negative happens. No thanks but again - if you want to try to fight the good fight I support it.
All the GUI productivity apps run better on a Mac—image editors, IDEs / text editors, apps like Slack or Zoom or whatever.
My introduction was to use nix instead of brew and ignore the whole "declarative configuration" aspect. It took me a while to get comfortable enough with that part of the ecosystem, but that's irrelevant to my point.
Give nix a try, use it like you'd use brew. Ignore the declarative configuration stuff for a bit.
My brew list is intentionally very short and my faffing about desire is limited.
Generally I use brew to pull in asdf (https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf) to install programming languages/tooling, it works flawlessly.
I use Pipx (https://github.com/pypa/pipx) to install python thingies (such as yt-dlp) as a cli.
Go and Rust handle binaries in their languages beautifully and without issues.
When you have some time might be worth it to start over. Don't use brew to install/manage your python, try it like how I wrote.
I never used brew to install or manage my python precisely because it gave me so many issues.
I’m constantly fighting Brew on all three computers where Brew is installed. Yes, I have wiped them, the problem is Brew, it is not the particular installation. If it were a problem with one particular installation of Brew, then it would not suddenly become a problem on a new fresh install of Brew.
The idea that you would need to wipe anything to start over is just bizarre to me in the first place. One of the many problems with Brew. Brew is extremely slow and it is prone to doing things that I do not want it to do without explaining why it is doing them or how I can alter its behavior (why is it installing package X? why is it updating right now?). Sometimes when I install a package, I get a spurious failure, and I need to re-run the installation command. Sometimes I just want to install one package, but it goes through “brew update”—which is extremely slow.
EDIT: I doubt your question is in good faith considering the 'cult' comment, but to answer your question at face value regarding benefit the first one that comes to mind is being able to have multiple versions of the same package and being able to rollback to previous versions if something breaks. This also means you can have package A depend on package B v1, and package C depend on package B v2, and both can coexist. If this is not something that's valuable to you, that's fine too. The other killer feature is being able to install dependencies for a project/repository if it uses nix - just clone, cd, and run `nix develop` and you'll have all the dependencies available.
Yes, I understand the multiple versions of the same package thing - Go/Rust have package managers that quite reliably solve that problem. Pipx also to a certain extent solves that problem.
Brew is useful mostly for casks (browsers, mac apps, fonts) which don't usually call for multiple versions.
I'm sure it is a hairy problem for some combination of languages/tools but I guess I'm somehow completely side stepping it. Perhaps I'm more likely to encounter it if I treated my laptop as a server because that seems more like where Nix might shine as a sort of ansible/chef/puppet on steroids ;)
# search for a package called `foo`
nix search nixpkgs foo
# install package foo, user-wide
nix-env -i foo
You can also test-drive a package without committing to it, e.g. you want to try the program `cowsay` but only want to use it once:
nix-shell -p cowsay
cowsay
exit
That being said, They are still comparing against the M1 chips here. They aren't only comparing against Intel.
Both Intel and AMD has done great job with their processors recently.
“With M2 Pro on MacBook Pro: Rendering titles and animations in Motion is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 20 percent faster5 than the previous generation.
Compiling in Xcode is up to 2.5x faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and nearly 25 percent faster5 than the previous generation.
Image processing in Adobe Photoshop is up to 80 percent faster1 than the fastest Intel-based MacBook Pro and up to 40 percent faster5 than the previous generation.”
Apple is now facing the same struggle as AMD and Intel. They have a generational processor product that relies on new silicon to get faster, and they can't get new silicon fast enough. The M2 was basically just a wattage-bump of the M1, and looking at the performance increase/processor count, I'm inclined to call the Pro/Max the same thing. You're telling me you added 2 cores to a 10 core system for a 20% performance increase? Wow, color me surprised.
The whole thing feels like Apple's lack of humility here is biting them in the ass. There's nothing wrong with paving your own path in the tech industry, but mocking your competitors is not what a reasonably-educated analyst does. It's what someone in marketing does.
The linked website for this discussion is marketing.
Mostly, it's ironic that Apple is comparing themselves to a company that they want so desperately to escape. And, once you do run the math on their actual year-over-year improvements, it's not that different from AMD or Intel. And Apple is increasing their power consumption to hit those numbers. It's quite literally square one in a sense, just with a different CPU architecture and a different manufacturer.
They are selling to professionals, but probably not ones that speak your exact language. Having a solid understanding of hardware puts you into a small small minority of professionals that this was meant to be for. This is the same for Intel and AMD marketing: hardcore tech people are not the target audience for this material.
Professional:
1. relating to or belonging to a profession.
2. engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
"Professional" writers using a word processor might not understand what "hardware-accelerated H.264" means, yet there it is on their website under Air! Are those for "hardcore tech" people?
You're referencing marketing material. All marketing material is to sell the product, usually to a somewhat targeted subset of the buyers. Looking at their sales, and around any office, their marketing, and "Pro" products, appear to be extremely appealing to a large range of professional users. I think this shows that their "Pro" label is appropriate. I'm having trouble understanding why you think it isn't appropriate.
Do you have a notebook in mind that is worthy of a "Pro" label, so I can see what you're baseline is?
Should they buy the Air, or pay the premium for the Pro? After all, they're "hardcore tech" people.
Do you have an example of a notebook where a "Pro" label would be appropriate, as an example, so I can understand where you're coming from?
I do all compiling and heavy testing on servers, so the laptop is just for SSH, analysis software, and regular desktop stuff, for which it is fast enough.
Frankly this speaks volumes about what a sea change the M1 was if people are hoping for a 50% performance increase between CPU generations.
Apple has literally never posted “here’s a ream of benchmarks vs the Dell XPS XYZ and HP modelnumbersneeze738462” — pretending this is indicative of some grand conspiracy to hide performance deficiencies of these new M2 models the way GP is, is silly.
https://www.apple.com/ca/newsroom/2020/11/introducing-the-ne...
They talk all about how it's faster than 98% of PC laptops sold. When they are in the lead or feel they are then they do.
More realistically, this is one of the more drab ways apple announces products. They didn’t even have a presentation or anything. So they’re clearly not marketing with the same goals in mind as a presentation. I’d say the intended audience here are people already going to buy the latest model because they’re in the apple ecosystem.
Not that I’m inclined to defend a multi trillion dollar company, of course. It’s just pithy to hop into this sort of thread and grind the old axe against apple.
If they convince you to trade in the old one, they take that off the market and make cash.
For people who don't mind an ultra-brittle screen or who don't mind paying an extra 20% Apple tax to get their screen replaced when it breaks. Had a M1 Mac. Screen broke overnight. Meanwhile my LG Gram feels way more sturdy and hasn't let me down in years. M1 Mac lasted about 13 months.
Not happy at all with Apple asking 680 EUR to replace the screen on a M1 Mac I paid... 1 000 EUR. 68% after 13 months to replace their shitty screen.
And to get what? Another brittle screen.
Sure, it looks nice. But my LG Gram wins, hands down: I can count on that thing.
Have had an M1 Macbook Pro for 2 years now. Dropped it several times from various heights up to 4ft. Dropped books on it a couple of times. Screen still intact. "ultra-brittle" is nonsense.
(And in the 10 years I've owned Macbooks, never have I broken a screen despite dropping, etc.)
Not being pithy but is this a common issue? It's not one I've previously heard people complain about, the screen on my current gen and prior (2012?) MacBook pros but seem very solid so I'm surprised that this is considered a weak point...
As for my own single data point, I have the following in my house and none have had any issues whatsoever: - 2012 inch MacBook Pro - 2017 12 inch MacBook - 2019 MacBook Pro - 2021 Intel MacBook Pro (Company machine) - 2021 M1 MacBook Pro
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/gua...
" You always have the right to a minimum 2-year guarantee at no cost, regardless of whether you bought your goods online, in a shop or by mail order.
This 2-year guarantee is your minimum right, however national rules in your country may give you extra protection.
If goods you bought anywhere in the EU turn out to be faulty or do not look or work as advertised, the seller must repair or replace them free of charge or give you a price reduction or a full refund. "
And, really, a screen is a screen is a screen; any laptop screen is likely to be about as fragile as any other.
The repair prices are artificially inflated because there is no competition and they don't sell spares, and I think they keep them high on purpose to push their insurance product Apple Care. (Which is a great business for Apple, because the repairs are much cheaper for them than what they charge uninsured customers)
No problems with the screen. Travels with me literally everywhere I can take my backpack. No case.
Are you using your laptop as a frisbee?
As far as Apple tax, you pay for quality tools. In life you get what you pay for.
My Festool Domino was $1200. It makes one particular hole in a piece of wood. It's very, very good at it--but it doesn't replace my tablesaw ($600) or my bandsaw ($700) or my tracksaw ($400) or my drill/driver ($300) or my jointer ($600) or my planer ($900) or my drill press ($500) or or or--and I did not buy particular spendy variants of any of those, except the Domino. (I could've easily spent $2000 on a tablesaw alone.)
Contrast this to a $2500 Macbook Pro, which is a future computer from beyond the moon that can do a ton of revenue-relative work without even kicking on its fans, and can watch Netflix besides. It is also small; it provides all those benefits in a thing that can fit on your coffee table, without the ongoing costs of storing actually expensive tools.
Computer people complaining about computer costs when they're paid six figures for what they do with them is...it really needs to stop. It's silly.
I (try to) buy quality tools but I can't really justify Festool for my bodgy DIY attempts. I can barely justify the Bosch Professional tools I tend to buy instead.
My friend, an actual professional who fitted our kitchen, exclusively uses Festool. He can definitely justify it and swears by it. He says it's quicker and the tools suck up more dust which means less time cleaning up and less exposure to lung disease.
He'd never consider buying a MacBook Pro though as he thinks Apple is for poseurs ...like me.
I'm a professional software engineer and not a hairy arsed builder[1].
I spend roughly 8-10 hours a day on a laptop and I want a nice one. I'm probably going to switch from my Dell running Linux back to a MacBook Pro.
(That's for the shiny logo to make me look cool in coffee shops and not for the battery life, performance or general attention to detail obvs.)
1. This, apparently, is the vernacular used by friends in the trades to describe a "proper" tradesman. You live and learn I guess. ;)
I do agree with your friend about dust collection though, which is why I use the tools I do use. Dust is the absolute worst, and it is worth spending money to solve that problem IMO. The thing about Festool is that it's good at solving those problems portably, and in that light they're not that expensive. I've also gotten into 3D printing I've been building better dust accessories for my other stuff. (For example I've got a set of 4" dust couplers in development that are a WIP but are noticeably better than any of the options I have found online for a reasonable price and that work in a home shop without ducting.)
So...what, then?
But if you do they will wear out.
It's pretty hard to wear out silicon. That's why the batteries are glued in and they're made out of glass. To encourage them to artificially wear them out.
That said, I have heard frequent gripes from people with newer models about things like hinges, ports coming loose, and keyboards failing - I mean, from my experience with their software quality over the years, I wouldn’t be surprised if their hardware design, while having plenty of great new tech, lacks attention to detail.
Losing external GPU support with apple silicon has become a major deal. In the age of AI tools like stable diffusion, performance per watt matters less if you lose the capability to scale up these kind of workloads. Gurman's report about the mac pro tower gave us reason to hope on this (that the upcoming mac pro will have eGPU support), but when it comes to MacBooks, let alone the pros, no one knows when/if the support will arrive and when/if nvidia support will be added.
Sure, but developing with Java up-to-16 is much slower with M1/M2 due to ports not being available, and Rosetta having to emulate. Datapoint: We develop plugins for Confluence and it’s about 1 minute to load each page.
I don’t think developing Java 11 is a corner case of using a Mac.
* AWS Corretto: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/corretto/latest/corretto-11-ug/d...
* Eclipse Temurin: https://adoptium.net/temurin/releases/?version=11
* IBM Semeru: https://developer.ibm.com/languages/java/semeru-runtimes/dow...
* Oracle GraalVM: https://github.com/graalvm/graalvm-ce-builds/releases/tag/vm...
Now someone grab my arms before I dump water on this keyboard.
The M2-based 13" still has two USB-C on the same side and no SD: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
It does not have an SD card slot not MagSafe because it was a 13” M1 MacBook Pro. Nobody claimed that their MacBook was the latest chassis, just that it had an M1.
> The M2-based 13" still has two USB-C on the same side and no SD
One can easily interpret their comment to say that they are happy it still has USB-C on both sides. Most non-MacBooks have one or two ports, generally on one side only. With the addition of other ports, Apple could have very well removed some of the USB-C ports.
I’m not sure why you are trying to insist that they don’t know their own laptop. They even provided you a link showing the model did in fact exist.
The comment I replied to says that they're drooling over magsafe, sd card, and USB-C on both sides.
My point is that's been available for 18 months at the exact same range position (and a lower price point) as the new laptops.
The updated version of their current laptop doesn't have any of those.
> I’m not sure why you are trying to insist that they don’t know their own laptop.
I'm... not doing that?
> They even provided you a link showing the model did in fact exist.
I'm the only person who provided any link here.
The 13” remains a heavier Air, with two ports on the same side and no magsafe: https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-13/specs/
The m1 worked without any issues for 2 months. I upgraded yesterday to macOS Ventura:
* Upgrade finished but laptop froze. Hard reset.
* On first boot, the new System Settings failed to load icons, then froze. Trying to quit it froze the OS. Hard reset.
* I left the laptop plugged in for 12 hours, connected to 2 other displays over USBC. Laptop screen didnt turn on, other monitors did. Unplugged monitors, mashed keys on keyboard, replugged, laptop screen was still off. Hard reset.
I give Apple lots of credit for switching to ARM, but the last time I had this many issues that required a hard reset because the OS became unusable was Windows ME.
I used to praise macOS for its stability. It's still on average very stable, but in the last ~5 years the upgrade experience has not been rock solid anymore. I must have used at least a dozen Macbook Pro/Air and Mac Pro in that time, so I know it's not just 1 buggy laptop.
If you upgrade from Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura, for example, it becomes like a game of telephone. Small issues that happen with converting configurations accumulate. This makes me wonder if Apple tests new versions installed from scratch rather than upgraded over multiple generations like what happens in the real world.
But I've never felt like needing to do that with iOS - the only 'reinstall' occurs when I upgrade devices (and then I restore from iCloud backup). What problems did you run into that were resolved by a clean reinstall of iOS?
Funny to think that it's now Apple who have this problem.
I'm not invaliding your experience, just mentioning that others have different experiences.
If you think that is bad... don't get me started on Screen Time in macOS. It is 100% broken, in every way, for kids and adults, in the most inexplicable ways possible. [Example: The "internet filter" fails open after a few hours. You thought your 8-year-old was only on approved sites? MacOS says yes, but actually no.]
I control some important details, like having 128G of RAM and a dual 4Tb NVMe setup.
You didn't have to write "everything". You could have said "more".
It is so easy for open source proponents (which I am, but not to an unlimited degree) to fall into these illusions that are entangled with imprecise language.
I think we're very much on the same page.
(Yes, many things don’t work yet. For personal use it’s fine though)
Why not Linux on much better supported hardware from Lenovo or Dell? It just doesn’t make sense to me to buy such an expensive computer only to remove a core part of the package, Mac OS.
Specific Intel laptops aside, something doesn’t work for each of them either. These days sleep is a big issue with Linux on modern Intel laptops due to Windows Modern Standby. All in all, characterizing Asahi Linux as poorly supported is probably just based on some expectation that does not necessarily match reality. It runs very well and GPU is about the only thing that is missing. Plus, Linux on Macs has always had the advantage of having a big community focused on solving very standardized hardware issues. Once they work they work for everyone out of the box.
I still ditched Apple though, I don't regret having traded battery life for compatibility. Arm64 remains a pain over 2 years later and for many years to come.
I have a Dell Workstation from work (Specifically a Linux supported one, whatever that means) using linux and my personal Macbook Air M1 is running Asahi Linux.
I really ran into no issues, the experience was almost scarily smooth. Everything just works. Sleep is definitely worse than on MacOS but it’s better than my Dell.
I can’t name a single thing that is not equally bad or worse on the Dell.
I guess that’s the benefit of only having to target a very small amount of hardware, it saves time for improving other things.
I remember preferring Linux on PPC to Linux on intel laptops years ago. Apple PPC laptops tended to “just work” with Linux in my experience.
Would like to avoid Google and don't mind running my own server to manage it so long as I can use the default calendar app on iOS.
But… I get you. To have a really good experience you need to have a really supported setup and then everything works swimmingly. My work issued thinkpad is the AMD version of the P14s and it’s brilliant.
Upgrading used to be an event. Now it’s a meh-fest of clicking a button, waiting a little, and being unimpressed with the new features thinking “why did I even bother? Total waste of an hour”
The last true issue I had with apple hardware or software was in 2002-2003ish with a snow iBook that had a motherboard failure, but after that I've had nearly 20 unbroken years of basically fault-free existence which is pretty amazing if you ask me.
If they were to separate their first party app updates and OS updates (release wise, they can still market them together), more people would be able to pinpoint "ok it's not the entire update since I was on it just fine for a month, but actually just the notes app updated yesterday eating battery randomly". At least for cautious users.
While holding back app updates to stabilize the early upgrade experience might work, it's also somewhat contradictory to the idea that they upgraded the apps and their features and upgraded the OS as necessary to support the apps and features.
Every update since then has felt slow, or introduced bugs. Perhaps it was because Snow Leopard came on a physical disk, so they couldn't "just ship it".
My personal record stood at a bit over one week spent observing a dark screen with unmoving progress bar in the hopes that this time it will actually finish the upgrade.
Microsoft does distribute beta versions of Windows for third-parties to test against.
Does apple do the same? If Apple doesn't, then it's Apple's we have to blame it onto.
Much like Windows devs, Apple devs need to pay attention to this. If your livelihood is dependent on a platform, not paying attention is on you.
EVERY OS release will have some issues, and the people who are most impacted are the ones who chime in. If it "just works" for someone, they aren't going to chime in.
This is true of Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. I'd be curious to see a quantitative pre-release breakdown by OS and version. That might be more useful than individual anecdotes, as interesting as those are.
*However* Apple specifically only targets a very small subset of devices. The amount of obvious bugs that slip through in every release upgrade against such a small handful of devices from a company as big as Apple is pretty disappointing
Windows has to run on the overwhelming majority of "weird" x86 devices on the planet. The amount of work they have to put in with their hardware partners is comparatively staggering
My question is still legit: is there an (relatively) unbiased third-party that tracks bugs across major OS releases? Is that a bad question to ask?
It seems weird that these companies which presumably employ some programmers have this convention of bundling up all the bugs together for some nice combinatorial confusion. Everybody knows you keep your code in a working state from commit to commit, so you only have to handle one bug at a time, right?
I've been using macs for a long time and have never had any issues though. I also tend to run the betas very early on.
I don't doubt that you have issues though, I just think they have always been some % of users. And, now that more and more people are using macs that % turns into absolute larger numbers.
Going back to the early osx versions there’s have been weird problems when upgrading with peripherals and stuff plugged in
Permission issues also arise after every upgrade. I purposely wait until the .1 so that other people find all these issues but it's still super annoying.
Yeah, I feel the same. It's 180 degrees from a few years ago, when the MacBook specs were ho-hum but using MacOS was a big benefit (the physical hardware has always been great). The overall software experience with MacOS is now just "okay". The upgrade process is slow and there are a few UI quirks that other OS's just seem to do better.
Had a similar feeling while playing with an old iPod touch running the skeuomorphic/pre-flat iOS when compared with a modern iPhone.
Sorry, that was getting a bit ranty.
What is rose-tinted is the OP's remembering the OSes of a few years ago being great. Mojave and Catalina had a bunch of annoyances and weren't as good at recovering from a bad install or a bad update push as Monterey and Ventura. Not that Monterey and Ventura are great either.
It's amazing how snappy it is. I wish Apple would offer levers to turn off all the new (and laggy) features in their OSes for those of us who just want a computer to be simple and run apps.
The software _design_ however… yes, Apple is sliding. The new Settings is a mess. It’s so disorienting, even when I put aside the fact that I had used the old, NeXT-derived one for 20 years. You just can’t find anything without search, which adds steps.
There is a relative lack of attention to polish, discoverability, and charm. It’s all just made to be slick and shiny now.
As I age and switch constantly between OSes and devices for work, search has increasingly become my primary way of finding settings and whatnot. The part of my brain that remembers things spacially just doesn’t bother anymore.
- “General” is a trash fire of hodgepodge
- “Home Screen” & “Wallpaper” are separate top-levels
In general, the top level items are grouped by task, but the tasks aren’t labeled but instead implied:
- Radio signals (Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth)
- Noise & distractions (Notifications, Sounds, Focus, Screen Time)
- Input, output, and appearance (General, Control Center, Display, … Touch ID, …)
- Purchasing (App Store, Wallet & Apple Pay)
- Apple apps (except for the first, Passwords)… Mail, Contacts, Calendar, …
- Apple apps with media (Music, TV, Photos, …)
- All the other apps
But for a corporation making these decisions, I would venture that the questions around how iOS should do it better are a separate concern from this merging the iOS way into the Mac way.
Every day i have to fight my macbook to get it to work properly. It’s slow to start up and external display is a daily struggle.
And this is a 2019 i9, not some old slow machine
The adverts in particular.
What adverts? Apple Music? iCloud Storage? Apple TV? Oh wait those are macOS
Maybe it’s normal for OS X but my Linux experience is pretty much the opposite - rock solid, everything is fast, and nothing breaks. Granted the hardware does seem really good (except for slow anything to do with x86 and a useless GPU that can’t play games or do VR).
Then it'll occasionally get into a state where it tells me it's connected to the network but doesn't have Internet access and it must be a problem with the network (I know it's not because I have other devices connected to the same network that work fine). To get out of this, I have to turn WiFi off and back on again but Apple in there infinite wisdom has decided if I turn it off and back on too quickly, I must've done so by mistake and so they don't actually ever turn it off. So I have to turn it off, wait some unknown period of time (I usually wait 30s), and then turn it back on. Drives me crazy.
In the end, every morning when I get to work, I expect it to be roughly 5 minutes between when I arrive and when I'm actually online.
My personal computer running Linux has never had such a ridiculous issue (it does occasionally have issues but they're usually fixable after a quick Google search) but somehow everyone claims Apple just works and Linux is to much of a pain.
(Or call support, I guess.)
You must get a high quality USB-C cable though. I got Anker brand cable. Previous cable I had lying around the house would only give me 60hz
My father, a long time apple user, decided to get an Apple M1 to replace his old Apple macbook. He bought the M1 8GB model (without consulting me). Turns out that the Apple M1 w/8GB uses ~4GB of that just to run the OS and if you happen to install adobe creative cloud there goes another 2GB and if you use some other "darkroom-alike" program to open a 20MB photo suddenly you're out of RAM and the software starts crashing.
Apple M1 8GB computers, stuffing the cache with their rosetta translation and lack of native software, cannot even edit photos. They're only good for surfing the web and sending email. Apple selling these as actual functioning general purpose laptops is a fraud.
All that aside, it's borderline criminal any new computer is being sold with 8GB RAM. This is 2023 for crying out loud. Do you want a 56K modem to go along with your miniscule amount of memory?
If I didn't have experience with higher-specced Macs in the past the experience would be enough to make me swear off ever using Macs again.
The only reason I got a Mac for the first time is because the 8GB had good value. I would never buy the higher-end Macs because spending that much money on a fragile thing that cannot be upgraded is ridiculous to me.
How much faster? I’m not sure what your specific point of comparison is.
Sure, the SoC provides many advantages, many due to Apple’s UMA (Apple’s Unified Memory Architecture) but the system is still limited by storage speed and latency.
But if we’re talking about the relative performance difference between solid state memory (i.e. SSDs, if that is the correct technical term here) and UMA RAM, I’d expect* a significant difference, perhaps (1) an order of magnitude in terms of latency and (2) 2X to 5X in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention that excessive SSD writes would be unwise.
Now I will admit, if there are large parts of the operating system that don’t need to linger / lurk / creep around in RAM, they could be swapped out. And they might even be kept on SSD and not have to be rewritten at all except for patches and upgrades.
* This is a guess based on ‘usual’ data-locality rules of thumb, hopefully allowing for Apple architecture somewhat. I’m happy to be educated / corrected.
This is not how this works
I've been on an 8GB M1 for two years, running Adobe CC the entire time. I've edited absolutely massive photos - Gigabyte TIFFs, batch processing, etc - and never had any crashes.
In fact I've done the above while playing HD video from YouTube with 40 tabs open and not experienced so much as a hiccup.
Now I’m on an M2 Air and I don’t see myself needing to upgrade in the next 2-3 years.
I can say the exact same thing for my Linux XPS, in fairness. My M1 battery will last longer, for sure, but both will last a whole work day. But because the M1 can't run Linux to a good standard, it's mostly just used to test/debug OSX related issues.
Yeah, battery is great, not arguing that. But if you use heavy web apps and do a lot of VC, half day is best you can get.
But that's also irrelevant. Whole day of battery, if you don't use heavy apps is very different from whole day of battery.
It's part of Wirth's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
Time from "push button" to "something happens on screen", was faster 20 years ago in some aspects.
Has turned a bit on my M2 Air it seems though.
I happen to have 2 identical monitors, and a third I can't use on a macbook pro with m1 pro. They're in H configuration, portrait, landscape, portrait (last two are apparently the same model though different years)
The mac constantly confuses the two identical monitors (one is rotated 270 degrees so it ain't great). I've tried two USB video card adapters; one wouldn't work at all, one from Plugable couldn't rotate the missing monitor (rotated 90 degrees). If I asked it to drive the middle horizontal monitor, it mirrors with the matching monitor (again an issue because it's rotated 270 degrees)
drives me nuts, there's no fix, it's a gamble which orientation it'll choose. making things worse - it also won't wake from sleep without a lot of trickery with the lid closed (only reliable method I've found is re-attaching the power cable... not great when I need to do this daily).
my old intel mac? hit the spacebar on my usb keyboard to wake up. no issues with 3 monitors, and could even drive the internal display with it.
I don't care about 2 external 4k screens -- some of us are still on 1080p and don't care. how did we regress like this?
I consider getting a MBP, but quite frankly I wonder if I could really let it crunch "pro" workloads over night, because either they have infinitly silent active cooling (doubtful) or they throttle the thing (bad). If I pay for top notch hardware I want to have it crunch at full blast for as long as I desire, if I need it.
I have literally traveled with just a 30 watt anker brick for my phone and used it to trickle charge my MacBook overnight and I’m good to go.