To answer directly, I actually really love the Framework conceptually. What they're doing is immensely important for notebooks, and I'd love to see Apple follow suit one day (but I doubt that'll ever happen).

I just can't stand Linux. I've tried several distros and after using macOS since 2009 and Windows since 1995, I just can't be bothered by all the things Linux distros lack, if muscle memory for the other two aren't already the biggest obstacle for me.

I am insanely efficient on macOS, and I almost never have to think about global hotkeys, global search & calculations, managing apps & settings, and seeing nearly zero interruptions while I work -- including popups, notifications, performance dips (if I'm being reasonable with my usage), OS UI bugs, etc.

These all do occasionally happen, but never to the extent I see in popular Linux distros and even Windows. It's just a fact, after nearly 30 years of first-hand usage and comparison.

I also use macOS because it is as extensible and open as I need it to be for downloading and installing packages, and customizing the OS to suit my needs -- which is something iPhones can't do without jailbreaking and such.

I've never owned an iPhone, and seldom use my iPad. I'm an Android guy, and being able to sideload apps in rare, but important, moments is important to me. The openness of Android has been important as well, namely the fact that Firefox has always been allowed to use its own browser engine since the start, enabling the same freedoms I have using it on desktop platforms, as a primary example.

Valid points. Out of curiosity, which distros have you tried?

PopOS most recently, and I ran into significant UI lag, jank, bugs all over the place with the correct NVidia drivers installed and everything. I tried it on two machines, and had pretty much the same experience. After troubleshooting and seeking resources/answers, I eventually gave up and told myself, "maybe in another 5-10 years", as we all say.

That was a few years ago. Anything older I've forgotten honestly at this point. It's been a long time, and I'm certain things are probably better these days, but I have absolutely no reason to switch. My muscle memory and setups on my current machines are too good to let go of.

I have a Steam Deck -- but their experience is so tailored that I'm not sure it counts. I'm not actively using the desktop environment unless I need to use a different game platform. I wouldn't be using this machine for work at all though.

I see this question a lot.

People complain about the products that are best for them. Nobody (with the power to decide what they use) complains about a product long, unless it is still their best choice.

And suppliers of products being complained about are not companies "not worth supporting". They are making the product that is the best fit for the complaining customer! They are not perfect. They can do better. So customers speak up.

Yeah that seems to be a common theme with Apple peeps, being fine with "Well if you don't like what Apple gives you, go somewhere else!"

But like...if someone really does like the product but knows that product could be even better, wouldn't they naturally speak up about it?

Your last point is exactly where I'm coming from here. People complaining about a product is usually a sign of its wide, and possibly avid, use.

After trying UI design tools and web development on Windows and Linux machines and finding the experience very sub-par for my needs, I've found macOS, and by extension, Apple's hardware quality, choice of keyboard layout, ease of use, etc. to be superior for my needs. I have almost no complaints about the Mac platform with the ways I've been able to customize it, and its nag-free experience. As they say, it just works™. ;)

It feels made for UI design & development, with minimal to no configuration, no late nights fixing file permissions or access issues, fixing Linux subsystems, fiddling with very limited terminals, and suffering from buggy piecemeal UI shell packages that prioritize fancy, laggy animations over functionality.

On the contrary, I've found not only doing these tasks and multitasking to be very frustrating when getting serious work done on other machines, primarily frequent interruptions (Windows) and major inconsistencies with global keyboard shortcuts.

For what it's worth, I'm also a staunch Android user, never owned an iPhone, occasionally use an iPad for reading and other content creation, absolutely love my Windows PC for gaming and surfing on my TV, and work exclusively on my MacBook. I'm very particular about using the most suitable machines for the tasks at hand, but well-rounded enough not to be completely captured by Apple.

If it's been a few years since you gave Linux a try, I'd strongly recommend giving it another go.

I had 2 macbooks fail simultaneously over the new year, and instead of laying down the $$$ for a new m3 mackbook, I put a linux station together, with the intent for it to be a windows dual boot.

At this point a couple of months later, windows is no more than a KVM/QEMU virtual machine (and runs its DAW/synth apps, significantly faster and with greater stability than either of my dead m1 macbooks ever did.)

Best tool for the job has changed.

An equipment manuifacturer who's goal is for hw failures to trigger a new purchase and not a repair should be enough incentive to ditch them. We all know Apple has fallen way further than that.

They're a litigious, anti-consumer company that hides behind some fake, faded, John Lennon esque / hipster image.

Time to cut them loose, isn't it?

> If it's been a few years since you gave Linux a try, I'd strongly recommend giving it another go.

I've heard this since around 2004, and did try it every once in a while. And while I have the utmost respect for the Linux desktop developers... the experience was never comparable to me. I'm a sucker for well-thought out and coherent user interfaces, and the rigid principles Apple developers have to follow are no match for a loose group of open source devs.

I will continue to follow their progress, but as it stands, using a Linux desktop on my main machine feels like swapping a Mercedes with a home-built Gokart.

I could say the same things, but at some point I realised that for me the less the interface the better. And Linux is so very good at it.

I've been using only Linux (Manjaro) for the last six years, and although there's been marked improvement it's still in many ways buggier and clunkier for everyday use than even Windows.

and they're not "supporting" a company by merely buying their product.

They are deciding that said product is the best fit for price on their individual criteria.

To "support" would require you to make sacrifices - aka, buy an inferior/worse-fit product from a company you want to support, instead of from the company that actually offers the best-fit for yourself.

When I bought my MacBook Pro M1 Pro (ugh, stupid names, c'mon Apple!), it was probably the most confident I felt about a technology purchase in years, at least since Apple finally ditched the ridiculous touch bar and gave us back the Escape key and function row.

Aside from me throwing too much at it (should've sprung for 32GB), it's the single best notebook I've ever owned, and the most reliable.

To say it was the best fit for me is an understatement! It's truly great!

Because Apple is a company that does actually make great hardware, just marred by their idiot suit and tie MBA best schools social ties 1% tax dodging executive team that wants to foster the cultish attitude of their consumers and... well they succeeded in a way.

Did you entertain the possibility that Framework might not be available at OP’s place. Because that’s very much likely to be the case, just like it’s not available to a lot of us :)

"You hate capitalism so much, _and yet you live under capitalism!_ How very hypocritical of you..."

Don't get me wrong, Framework makes a lot of neat stuff, but you can't swap out a Macbook to _anything_ without consequences. It does not take a lot of imagination and empathy to see that for some people, those consequences aren't acceptable at all, or not simply not worth the utterly undetectable sting that a company such as Apple would feel by us not buying a single Macbook from them.

If someone has to alter their entire work environment and process, while Apple doesn't even notice, is that truly worth the moral superiority they'll feel? For a whole lot of people, that answer is "no", and I can't blame them.

And yet we live under capitalism...

What a false equivalency.

No, you can’t avoid capitalism, you’re born in the country your born and you don’t have that choice.

This is more like moving to a capitalist country and then complaining that you live in a capitalist country.

The tech companies have boiled their frogs slowly and deliberately. Apple didn't start out the way it is today after all.

Good point -- With great power comes great inevitable irresponsibility and abuses. The human condition never fails to pollute and corrupt anything as untouchable as Apple. Too big to fail, by definition!

Potentially because Macbooks represent a more sustainable model for software distribution and don't prevent people from downloading apps directly from websites.

Precisely! That's the key difference between iOS and macOS devices, essentially. I've never owned an iPhone primarily because its environment is so constrained, and the possibility of losing access to important apps due to failure of approval or other frivolous issues Apple hysterically deems unfit for publishing, is a huge single point of failure not worth risking.

In reality, it's safer to assume that most or all major apps don't have problems with this, so I'm being a little facetious here. Regardless, after nearly 20 years on Android, nobody could possibly pry my muscle memory and features I've come to expect from my cold dead hands. :D

‘Nearly 20 years’ got me. I thought ‘no way, the very first iPhone was released a little bit more than 10 years ago and Android was released a year after’. Then I realised we’re closer to 20 years than we’re to 10 years. It was almost 17 years ago, the very first iPhone!

Daunting to think about, right??

Because MacBooks are just better. (Have owned both.)

I have owned, and continue to own, all sorts of laptops and phones. I could rant about Apple all day long online, but in the end their product is simply superior.

Within the corporate monopolist called Apple, that is to say within the minds of all its collective employees, lies an old idea still warm and vibrant after decades of waning indifference. This idea is called Apple Computer, and it makes the best gosh-darn computers in the world: the Mac.

It is such a powerful and self-evident idea that those computers are still above and beyond the best ones in the world, even with all those years of indifference.

Heh, Apple Computer also made the iPhone. Everything since launch has been incremental change, not innovative.

Except Airpods. They're pretty sweet.

Until battery life starts deteriorating any that happens real soon and you can’t even know when it started and where it is currently unlike that of, say, an iPhone. Then it’s unusable — hurrah, buy a new pair. The Apple way! :)

This is not unique to Apple. All headphones with tiny batteries in the drivers take the piss after a few years aging.

That said, my MacBooks have the best laptop batteries of any computer I’ve owned. My wife went through multiple laptops in the time I kept one in college. Turns out some electronics just suck!

I have a pair of Pixel Buds, how do I see their current battery capacity and cycle counts?

Are there any wireless earbuds (same / similar form factor as the AirPods) that this doesn’t also ring true for?

> Except Airpods. They're pretty sweet.

Sweet devices that keep falling off your ears. You need AirPod ear hooks to keep them on.

It sounds like you do, most people don't.

The people who do are a significant minority just around ~30-40%. Wouldn't be a tremendous market for ear hooks otherwise. There are thousands sold every day on some retail sites and sometimes thousands every hour if discounted. Out of the 2 dozen folks I know who have bought airpods, 8 have also bought ear hooks. That's ~33%. Anecdotal, but you can look at sell figures and the vast variety of airpod earhooks products if you don't believe me - and look at the 10k-100k product ratings.

I am surprised to hear your experience here. Many of my friends have them and only one has ever mentioned a fit issue. He bought larger tips and they now fit perfectly apparently.

Researching I can indeed see such products exist, although given Apple appear to be selling over 100 million pairs a year[0] (also surprising to me!), I suspect your estimate is inflated. Note this is over 300,000 pairs per day.

Anecdotally, I see people with Airpods daily but have not once ever seen hooks on them. Maybe there's a cultural element at play?

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPods#Sales

It's obviously an opinion.

I have plenty of computers running Windows and a variety of Linux distros at my home. Laptops, desktop, servers, and weird hybrids of the former.

Same with mobile - I have tried Android, iOS, PureOS, GrapheneOS.

Apple's UX is so far ahead for me. It's just better. But, you obviously disagree. No need to be disparaging.

Consider stating opinions as opinions, and not as facts.

And yet if your statement were true, it would not explain why others who also own "both" disagree with you. Absolutism does not serve you, there are few subjects in this world that lack nuance.

My statement is very clearly an opinion.

> Because MacBooks are just better

I'm not sure how that implicitly conveys an opinion.

Saying "the sky is blue" is not an opinion when the sky is blue, it's a fact. Saying something is better is also not an opinion, it's a fact. Saying "in my opinion" or "I believe/think/feel like/etc" makes your statement an opinion, ommiting that is ambiguous and is left for interpretation.

Because people are incredibly entitled and want to have their cake and eat it too.

So you bought an iPhone knowing you can’t download apps and then go cry because you can’t download apps?

Then your argument is that well, all my friends have iPhones or there are some other good features, or whatever else you make up?

So you obviously find value in the product, it’s missing a feature, but you will consciously buy it anyway, it doesn’t make any sense.

Does the standard simply change when a company is big enough?

Imagine ordering a steak salad even though the restaurant doesn’t allow modifications to the ingredients, then throwing a temper tantrum when you get it because it has steak. It’s unbelievable.

You might find this hard to believe, but people buy products based on a number of factors. For smart phones, the number of factors is dizzyingly complex, and yes, the effects it has on smoothness of communication with the people in your life is one of those factors. Sometimes a specific feature is one of those factors.

What "doesn't make sense" is reducing a complex decision down to a specific factor, and then trying to create the narrative that your specific chosen factor is the sole reason anyone chooses a specific product.

It is completely fair for people to prefer iPhone and also argue for Apple changing their policies.

Imagine there are only two restaurants in the world and they both only serve steak, yet when you want a salad people say go to the other restaurant.

Except in this case your beloved android lets you do whatever you want, so why not go use them?

And there are multiple manufacturers that aren’t associated with Google who make phones.

If this were truly such a shortcoming, more companies, in addition to already existing ones, would create phones with side loading apps.

Imagine me pitching my idea to YC, it’s like an iPhone, but with side loading apps! It’s brilliant!

You’d be laughed out of the room.

The issue is you want those good Apple features, you want that Apple ecosystem, the blue bubbles, etc, but you also want to have a feature that the phone doesn’t have and people are crying that Apple won’t give them that feature.

I don’t even care, and I even if I did, decisions already been made so there’s nothing to argue.

This is simply an amusing situation, the grandstanding is simply funny.

Imagine using YC as a corollary for consumer demand (or hell, corporate righteousness).

> I don’t even care

> This is simply an amusing situation, the grandstanding is simply funny.

Wait till the Commission delivers the punch-line.

I don’t think you made the point you think you made here.

It’s possible to not care about something and still submit an opinion. Or maybe it’s the degree of caring that is confusing you, I care enough to comment and have a viewpoint, but I don’t care to the degree that I am upset or will lose any sleep over it.

There you go, hope this helps you understand what I meant there so that you are no so hung up on it so as to feel the need to quote it.

Please do save me the suspense and share the punchline now!

It’s perfectly reasonable to use YC here as at the end of the day they’ve helped launch of ton of companies that are popular with consumers.

Regarding the irony in using them as an example of corporate righteousness, well you did get me there and I agree with you.

> Please do save me the suspense and share the punchline now!

Apple hasn't finished their setup! You might be able to guess where it's going though, we've heard this one before.

This is a great metaphor because if we accept it then the salad is the web, yet no one wants that.

I think there is a great desire for web-like application distribution to work well on smartphones, but with none of the drawbacks like poor rendering performance and lack of native features.

Of course, native apps that wrap web-based apps is almost the reverse of that, and we still often get laggy, sub-par experiences as a result of broader platform support for lower maintenance costs.

PWAs fill the opposite gap where you get native-like apps at the expense of low performance, distributed any way you like.

What we really need is for high-performance native applications to be distributable via the open web, and that's exactly what the EU is enforcing here, in a way. What would be better is for WebAssembly to take off and offer native performance in apps that can be visited at URLs, just like we're used to.

Why are you defending a trillion dollar company lmao?

Why do you care so much that Apple has been forced to give consumers more choice, you can still just use the app store yourself, nobody is forcing you to use apps from alternative stores.

This is the standard "one true religion" reaction imo.

maybe because forcing people or companies (property of people) is wrong?

The phones are not property of Apple though.

The users should not be forced to run Apple approved applications.

Are you familiar with the history of antitrust intervention and the laundry-list of real-life examples that proves you wrong?

https://competition-policy.ec.europa.eu/antitrust-and-cartel...

We have been forcing people and companies into compliance of some sort since the dawn of civilization.

Apple is the only one acting entitled here. Why doesn't the App Store deserve competitors? Why should we accept Apple's fees and failures when they deliberately limit competition?

They're acting like an anticompetitive wuss if you ask me. If Apple is the righteous one here (imagine that), they can pack up their bags and tell the whole EU to shove it. They can individually invite all 27 markets to kiss their ass and watch as the relevancy of Apple products plummets in the first world. Problem solved, Apple saves the day. 中国梦!

Or, they can take the king's ransom of iPhone revenue and surrender their asinine software double-standard. This doesn't end well for them either way, there's no sense it making it last longer.

Agreed, and well worded. Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone. Distributing and finding apps wasn't always simple, but then again, the need for a central browsing experience to find and download apps was never truly a thing before -- maybe outside of Steam for games. The key difference with Steam is that the same games have always been available on other distribution platforms, generally, so it doesn't suffer from the same limitations.

Show of hands, how many people actually spend multiple minutes (or hours) just swiping through their respective App Store just to find something new and interesting?

Aside from the store experiences, the web's powerful (gasp!) ability to find and download content including Computer Applications™ has always been its greatest strength. App stores are a net detriment seeking to protect the lowest common denominator: the uneducated computer user who hasn't bothered to learn everyday security practices to avoid downloading malicious apps or vetting software developers on their popularity and/or security themselves.

This takes a little knowledge and practice, but this isn't much different from shopping for good produce in a grocery store. Avoid the rotten fruit, and use your friends/family to help you judge what's best! That's the beauty of freedom on our devices, as it enables the power users and enthusiasts to enjoy these devices at their fullest, without senseless obstacles offering unsolicited "protection".

> . Never in computing history has a walled garden like Apple's existed until the iPhone.

wot...

How was playing that Super Mario Bros with on your Sega Master System back in the day? I don't remember Sega having the 10NES subsystem.

Ever heard of this little place in the early to mid 90s called AOL? Compuserve? Prodigy? Any cell phone company long before Apple's app store

And you act like anyone who has a Kindle or a Nook isn't in a walled garden, at least for 99% of the people who don't know/care that you can install books via Calibre or something.

And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling. It was just a massive pain in the ass and drumroll... 99% aren't going to do it.

This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it, and everybody railing again Apple loves to accept it in basically every other facet of their lives.

> This is not new, Apple wasn't the first to do it

Microsoft got pretty far, up until "the inquiry".

> And you know you can sideload apps on Apple devices right? Even before the EU ruling.

If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.

> If by sideload you mean "repeatedly sign apps until your face turns blue" then yes. If you mean "install software like a normal person", then no.

Yep. Exactly.

And breaking free of the walled Kindle/Nook garden is similarly out of reach for about the same number of people that don't care about Apple's walled garden, which is the majority.

Again, they literally exist in every corner of our lives, and the 99% of consumers/normies don't care.

If they don't care, then it shouldn't matter that third-party options exist. The same thing happens on Android, nobody uses F-Droid even if the apps are better and cheaper. The fact that it exists puts meaningful pressure on competitors though, and fills the niche that I use the device for.

The "walled Kindle/Nook garden" isn't similar Apple's ecosystem. A Kindle or Nook will let you access it's EMMC and put Epub files or PDFs wherever you need to. It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there. It's "out of reach" in the sense that you need the skills to follow a Wikihow article to do it - my grandma could figure it out.

iPhones don't let you install IPA files on equal-footing as Apple, ever. That's the problem, and it's what the DMA remediates. I don't care how you or the normies feel about it any more than I consider the public sentiment towards Bell telephone or Internet Explorer.

> It functions indistinguishably from a store-bought file and doesn't even make you enable Developer Mode to get there.

This is incorrect. Modern Kindles classify books added as "documents" rather than books, which limits their features and treats them as second class citizens.

I doubt most people care, but you're not on equal footing to Amazon loading a book onto a Kindle.

Oh. My Kindle Touch is coming up on 10 years old, I probably shouldn't assume it's the same for everyone.

My primary mechanism to load books on my Kindle is via emailing ePubs, granted, I'm probably in the minority of users but I couldn't ask for an easier workflow.

> So you bought an iPhone knowing you can’t download apps

I didnt know that when I entered the apple ecosystem. Can I have a refund for all the apps Ive bought on my phone?

Dude this is the foundation of capitalism. Its not supply and bend over. Its supply and demand.

It is totally reasonable to demand a better steak salad from some restaurant that doesn't allow modifications and moreover totally reasonable to point out how asinine they are for not making easy-to-do modifications when you point it out since that is what you as a paying customer want.

Imagine we lived in a world where 95% of restaurants never ever and vehemently so denied any modification to menu items. It is unreasonable then to demand they change? I need to move towns to get lunch?

This is the insanity we live in with the walled gardens of Apple.