Everything was pushing me in the direction of buying a new laptop (with a small discount relative to the new price) and transferring everything across.
If the mice had to deal with an intermittently disappearing cursor, and erratic hover behaviour on a 2 year old M2 Mac with the latest version of Sequoia .. that would probably illicit a very different response.
Are mice known to spill blood?
For example like will my wifi work today. Will my laptop still have any battery when I open it. Is today the day I surprise boot to tty and have to figure out what changed before I can start working.
I'll stick with the year-to-year unpredictability of apple over the day-to-day unpredictability of linux.
A Linux system stays the same unless you change it.
I also personally disagree that updates break system by the way. I have used Arch for more than a decade and has yet to experience one of this alleged frequent disturbance.
What I'm talking about is changes because of updates, yes. Auto updates, or ones I did, or an update to specific software that caused a library update to break something else. All that counts as "me changing it" sure. Like I said I guess I need a system a little less prone to breaking because of my actions. I'm a programmer not a linux admin.
Not updating your system is not a magic solution either. I ran Linux Mint for 9mo and twice during that time I ended up in a bizarre situation:
1. the menu bar, or whatever it’s called (taskbar/dock equivalent) had disappeared on boot and I spent about 2 hours trying to get it back
2. the system simply wouldn’t boot into Cinnamon anymore; I ended up reinstalling
Bought a MBP and while it has some annoying quirks I don’t have any crazy ruined-my-day issues anymore.
(macOS is my daily driver too, but I wouldn't mind having that feature)
In practice, even with a rolling release distro I have not had things break on an update in a very long time (not at all on my current install, which is two years old), and with stable distros its literally been 20 years since something did not boot.
Any OS seems to have some bugs on updates.
I have heard battery life is better so not arguing about that, but its rarely that I will not wake my laptop for more than a day or two so its not a problem I experience either.
On MacOS, I more often have to give up and live with the annoyances.
Hardware is the the big exception. None of my PCs have had nearly as good build quality or battery life (on Linux, at least) as a Macbook. Maybe I should try a Framework.
There are also more footguns and rabbit holes. Overall, I am about as happy with Linux than with macOS (I use both daily), but I would not say that one is really more empowering than the other.
I like tinkering with KDE but it’s full of inconsistencies and instability in a way than even the worst Finder I’ve used was not (e.g. the whole desktop freezing when adding a widget to the desktop with a brand new install). Never mind the Russian roulette that is updating nVidia’s drivers.
On the other hand on macOS it’s easier to get to things that are actually productive.
The culture of products not under the control of the customer does the same thing. A culture that sees this as normal is a depressed culture.
To test whether the mice are depressed, researchers give them something rewarding that requires a little effort to get (e.g., sugary water vs. plain water).
The depressed mice give up. They are apathetic.
I imagine the mice believe that there is no way to change things. That might be true for the mice but it's not true for us.