Also, because there are so many PC laptops, it's really hard to get a good review of a PC laptop. There are so many configurations and PC makers often make small (but meaningful) changes to designs during a product's lifecycle. All of a sudden, the one you bought has a less bright display or the cooling system isn't as good or whatever. It makes it hard to reward companies for creating good products. There are premium PC laptops, but they still suffer from some of these decisions and they often cost about the same.
I've looked for alternatives to the Mac, but at this point I've stopped. I'm sick of doing research on junk to try and save a few bucks, I'm sick of trackpads that are unusable, and with the new M-series processors I simply never want to go back to a high-wattage processor.
I actually like macOS, but I'm really glad happy to see Linux advancing on Apple hardware. The Asahi Linux developers are amazing and I love reading their write-ups.
This part is duplicated by the business or professional branded products of Dell/HP/Lenovo/etc.
I think the part that cannot be duplicated (without very significant time and money) is the tight integration between software and hardware. Even if the other companies spend a little more for the premium components, they are not able to squeeze out the same performance.
> how awful macOS is
Then you realize you want your mouse and trackpad to scroll in reverse directions. So you download an app for that, which comes with its own updater.
And then you want a flat acceleration profile for your mouse, and you download an app for that. That, too, comes with its own updater.
Next, you realize that the Mac app-based cmd-tab sucks and you'd much rather have Windows-like behavior. So you download an app for that, which also comes with its own updater. (Yes, yes, I know the arguments Apple users bring out, it's always been done this way on Mac etc etc. Still really bad.)
Then you get a taste of auto-tiling on Linux and spend a couple hours setting up yabai and skhd (thankfully updated via homebrew), before realizing that you'll need to turn off SIP [1] for a semi-usable experience.
Then you do go and turn off SIP, and you realize that your iOS apps no longer work because macOS has DRM built into its hardware that detects if you've turned off SIP.
And then, one of those apps prompts you for an update, and in doing so it steals your keyboard focus while you're typing. And you say "is this what I spent $2500 to experience", and cry.
[1] https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai#requirements-and-caveat...
I come back from lunch and my MacBook sounds like a jet turbine and is nearly on fire. Something needs a whole CPU just to show me a freaking dialog.
No, I don't. I want it to be like pushing or dragging a virtual piece of paper. That's what it is and how it feels the most natural to me. That being said I'm pretty sure you can already configure this without an app, in the system preferences.
> Next, you realize that the Mac app-based cmd-tab sucks and you'd much rather have Windows-like behavior.
No way. I love the cmd + tab and pairing that with keyboard shortcuts for navigating browser tabs is super powerful and doesn't require compromising the beautiful giant amount of screen real estate by inducing multitasking with multiple windows open. It's okay if it comes as a configuration but I would hope the default behavior stays this way.
Yes, that's what makes sense for a trackpad. Many people want that behavior for their trackpad, and also for their mice to scroll in the traditional direction, which is the opposite that of a trackpad.
> That being said I'm pretty sure you can already configure this without an app, in the system preferences.
Have you actually tried it out?
> No way. I love the cmd + tab and pairing that with keyboard shortcuts for navigating browser tabs is super powerful and doesn't require compromising the beautiful giant amount of screen real estate by inducing multitasking with multiple windows open.
I really don't know how macOS-style application vs Windows-style window switchers have any bearing on this. Why should two Firefox windows next to each other be treated differently from a Firefox window next to Safari window? A browser window is a browser window.
Not parent commenter, but yes, there is literally a single tick you can turn on to reverse the direction since forever.
Window snapping, tiling and screen navigation is a HUGE deal. I basically don't use my mouse when programming in Linux and it's really difficult to do the same on Mac.
I use Hammerspoon for this and I have keyboard shortcuts that will move the window and resize it to a predefined position. And I have shortcuts to select certain apps quickly.
Hammerspoon is scripted in lua so I don’t feel very constrained in what I can do.
There is also Phoenix, it uses JS.
There are a ton of background services that periodically spin up for no obvious reason, consuming a ton of CPU for a few minutes at a time, then go back to idle. I don't know what they're doing or why. Luckily since they're background services, they're bound to the efficiency cores on Apple Silicon, so they don't hurt battery life or thermals too much most of the time.
And as far as bugs go, the worst part is that bug reports through the Feedback app go largely ignored and bugs seem to keep accumulating. Even for bugs with clear and well-documented repro cases, Apple doesn't seem to pay any attention.
I'm a game developer, so the majority of my bug reports come from issues I've experienced with the graphics drivers or with Xcode. Here's a few examples:
- On macOS devices with > 60Hz displays, there is some awful stuttering with Metal apps in full screen mode. For some reason, CAMetalLayer nextDrawable sometimes just takes a very long time whenever it uses direct-to-display mode for presentation. That mode is implicitly enabled for full screen Metal apps, in order to bypass the display compositor and theoretically reduce latency. This bug also applies to MacBooks with the built in "ProMotion" (120Hz) displays. I'd be perfectly happy if there was just some flag to say "don't use direct-to-display", but if there is one, it's not documented anywhere. I haven't found a workaround yet. I originally reported this in August 2022. Apple replied once in October 2022 to say "we can't reproduce this, please provide a demo app". I provided the app that reliably reproduces the problem within an hour of their reply, but they've been silent since.
- Metal and OpenGL (the latter is emulated via Metal on Apple Silicon Macs) both exhibit a bug with triangle merging that causes partial derivatives to go very wrong along primitive edges. There's a usable workaround for this on the Metal side (just enable a [[sample_mask]] even if you're not doing multisampling). There's no such workaround for the OpenGL side, unfortunately. I was able to work with Asahi Lina to fix this for Mesa on Asahi Linux, and the fix itself was actually really trivial and didn't require a sample mask hack (it took a lot of debugging to figure out, though -- but that's how reverse engineering goes). To solve it, Apple would simply need to set a particular bit to disable triangle merging whenever the fragment shader uses derivatives. I reported this issue in December 2022, and Apple hasn't replied.
- This one is not as egregious as some of the bugs I've reported, and the Xcode team has responded reliably in the past. This is the first Xcode bug report I've had where they didn't acknowledge the report within ~14 days or so. In the current Xcode beta, using the graphics debugger will suspend the app but hitting "resume" leaves the app stuck suspended. The normal application debugger path does not do this, just the graphics debugger. I reported this in mid-June 2023, but haven't heard anything yet.
This came up on the ATP podcast recently. Feedback is a very, very crappy front-end for Apple's internal bug tracker Radar (which itself I've heard is not great).
Long story short, you have to submit an entirely new bug report through Feedback with the sample project attached. Apple's developers basically can't see replies to Feedbacks.
I believe the reason has to do with fears over GDPR and data collection. The Feedbacks are scrubbed of any kind of personal or identifying information before they are re-entered into Radar. I don't understand all the reasons, but I 100% agree this is absolutely nuts and not an appropriate way to manage bug reports.
- I've given up getting the permissions on my folder share (Samba) to stick. MacOS keeps reverting to defaults, with means everyone has full read/write permissions. Network files sharing should be a fundamental feature without hassle. Not I'm forced to read up on how to share using NFS.
- I created a FAT32 partition to share files with Asahi. I also setup GDrive syncing on it. Unfortunately, MacOS keep creating these annoying files starting with ._xxx for each single folder and file (and there are hundreds of them). I'm not sure why.
- I had to wipe the machine and do a re-install to enable third-party kernel extensions to load
- The system volume (the primary SSD) on the system does not appear in finder. I keep dragging it to the finder side-bar, and it keeps disappearing under unclear circumstances.
- And too many other weird stuff to list here.
https://gist.github.com/NayamAmarshe/c8dfabefc5a25df518edd34...
How is it worse? Ctrl + C, Ctrl + D, Ctrl + Z all work as expected in the terminal.
Now you want to copy something, which is obviously not going to work with Ctrl + C, so you just add a Shift to it instead of moving to a totally different key (which you absolutely still could, btw).
The mac way is less efficient & less flexible.
I've never had an issue with Ctrl+Shift+C. I also don't press Ctrl+C accidentally because I know when I'm using the terminal.
Even on macbook, I don't have issues with accidental presses but I don't like that I have to press an entirely different key on the keyboard to use the terminal.
Practically everything is handled with Cmd, with Option/Shift/Control being modifiers. It's the exception if something is handled exclusively with Option/Shift/Control, example being web browsers and Finder for tabs. Text selection is superior in macOS, and anyone who argues PgUp/PgDn/Home/End being a better solution in combination with Shift and Ctrl is insane. Depending on the port of a 3rd-party application, it may adopt macOS shortcuts and be consistent with everything else, or keep IBM/Windows-style shortcuts and break compatibility with other apps.
Part of this is related to having one of the most power efficient CPUs.
https://sneak.berlin/20230115/macos-scans-your-local-files-n...
The fact that you can no longer modify the boot volume and disable invasive services is the clincher.
For what it’s worth, Plasma’s file indexer is much more invasive in terms of running at the wrong times in my experience, so depending on what one mean, Linux also have similar services.
If it were privacy-first and read only, that would be another thing entirely. Defaults matter.
This is hacker news, so presumably we are hackers. I like being able to look into the system I'm running. When I'm seeing a weird network issue, I want to be able to peer into the kernel's tcp stack. When I see an error, I want to be able to add debug statements and understand it.
That's easy to do on linux. There's great tooling. That's hard to do on macOS.
I run websites and services. I like being able to run them locally, to try and reproduce bugs I see on my server. You can't run macOS on a server in a reasonable way, so the only reasonable choice there is linux.
I can understand how someone who doesn't really want to understand the software they use might want to use macOS or windows. On hacker news, I'd expect most people to understand the desire to be able to tinker and understand the system to a greater degree.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/tree/xnu-8796...
Buy the model I have, the 16gb 512gb M1 Air at £1400 new (or ~£1100 new-ish on eBay).
Keep both for a few weeks, transfer your stuff over, then sell your 8gb 256gb M1 Air for ~£700.
1TB would be the minimum for me, especially spending that kind of money. Also I doubt I'd get £700 for my MBA, seeing as that's how much I brought it for (refurbished from Apple). When I was buying it originally, the prices on eBay were more along the lines of £600. Even still, I don't factor in the money I'd get back from selling my previous machine
As for my reasons, there's a few. First of all, particularly on higher priced items, a lot of the trouble with the price comes to having the full amount in the first place. I can't walk into an Apple Store £700 short but tell them "don't worry, I'll have the rest later".
Aside from that, actually selling the thing is no guarantee, especially not for £700. I remember going to buy a laptop on eBay over 3 years ago and I still see it up there now. It might not be as in demand as the MacBook would be, but the point holds. Even if it does sell, the question then is how long it takes before it does.
Based on that, I assume if I can only afford something if I sell something else, I can't actually afford it. There's just too many factors involved. If I can afford the thing and I sell the old thing after, great, that's a nice bonus.