This. Macbooks are okayish computers but terrific laptops.

The MBP shines in things like screen quality, performance per watt and integration between every part of the laptop.

And it doesn't take much knowledge to tweak things a little bit further to enhance the experience outside the Apple bubble.

Great hardware held back by its software

It's not "bad". It's that it's very opinionated towards its real target: Designers, "high level" developers (e.g. web), and office 365 users.

Of course it won't do the trick if you want to do something like linux or bsd development

I feel like all three major OSs are crap and have trade offs. It’s all about finding which one’s trade offs are ones you can live with. I can use any of the three, but each annoys me in different ways. I use macOS because I find it less annoying than Windows or Linux once I’ve set it up. The truly annoying bit is that each OS has a bit of exclusive software and a few exclusive features that are amazing… but I don’t want 3 OSs.

and the fact that among the 3, MacOS is the hardest to virtualize on any other platform (technically against their ToS to do so on non-Apple hardware too last I checked half a dozen years ago). This effectively puts a stop to most practical use within bigger companies; it’s a safer bet to just buy a few Mac minis and toss them on a rack shelf somewhere, and a lot less of a headache when that on person who figured out how to make it work leaves.

Well said. Mac OS is not the best - there is no best, they all suck. It's just the least annoying.

I say some of it is still just plain bad - and I say it as someone who is considering a MacBook this year:

For example: the keys that Macs have instead of page up, page down, home and end still feels like four different "surprise me" buttons in every app I tried them in.

MacBook Pros definitely “do the trick” for hundreds of thousands of us software developers in Silicon Valley every day. Docker works fine on M1 MBPs and it’s not much of a chore to target amd64 with a Dockerfile eg

    FROM --platform=linux/amd64 python:3.7-alpine

Plenty of the software that runs the internet is written, compiled, and tested on MacBooks, even if it may get rebuilt for production on some x86_64 server or AWS instance (possibly even an ARM-based Graviton instance).

I agree that MacBooks have gotten less “pro” and now seem to cater to college kids who probably don’t need them more than they do to folks like Digital Imaging Technicians working on movie sets, but they’re still quite popular for the latter, even if some level of Windows and Linux machines have started taking up some of the roles (especially for things like VFX, see eg https://vfxplatform.com/ ) and sound and music recording / production / editing (plus Windows has had Cubase for a very long time, and before that, plenty of studios had Cubase for the Atari 520ST and Atari 1040ST back in the late 80s).

And, tbh, at least MacOS has Independent Virtual Desktops per monitor.

I'd sell my soul to have that on KDE

If you are OK with using a different window manager, Enlightenment has independent virtual desktops per monitor too.

Enlightenment versions since 17 have been a bit hit and miss for being stable vs. frustratingly buggy, though. Enlightenment 25 has been alright (version packaged in Bookworm (current Debian stable).

Honestly, a MBP running Linux with full hardware support would be the best laptop on Earth

> OEMs like Dell could try using a MacBook and mimic the trackpad.

You know what's crazy about the trackpad situation? You can put Windows or Linux on a real live Macbook and the trackpad gets worse. Everybody except Apple just insists on being wrong about trackpads.

I think the Windows philosophy for UX is just "good enough so enterprise don't ditch Windows", which given its enterprise monopoly and very strong lock-in and almost complete lack of viable alternatives means they can do almost whatever (and looking at Windows 11, seems they do make use of that freedom). They don't have strong incentives to make their OS fun, as long as it sort of does the job. And even if they did try to fix trackpads, at the price point lots of corporate drone Windows laptops sell at, could they possibly include decent trackpad hardware?

Linux is kind of puzzling though, this has been a super glaring issue for what is now decades. Are the people who could fix this just set up to never ever leave the home row? Is it actually too hard for an open source endeavour like Desktop Linux?

With Bootcamp on the Intel MacBooks, Apple supplied trackpad drivers that made it about as good. There was also an open source trackpad driver that you could install.

> It's mostly the trackpad that does it, I can use a MBP trackpad for a full 8 hour work day and never think about reaching for a mouse.

This. Plus battery life. I don't generally spend whole days on my laptop, and for meeting someone for work for a couple hours you can just take the laptop, no charger, no mouse.

> I wish someone would just make a shameless 1:1 rip off of the MBP with first class Linux support. Haha, why is it so hard for OEMs to get the hint?

Isn't that - theoretically - the Dell Developer Edition something?

The problem is OEMs know to do hardware, not software. The trackpad in apples is made by the same manufacturer as in most of the oranges. It's the software that's different. Same for most of the other tweaks that make apples less annoying to use.