It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.

I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.

Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.

On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.

Really annoying to get a ticket "fix this build script for macos" and it is freaking sed compatibility issues.

edit: to be fair that happened once, but it was annoying

But yes, macOS is a Unix, not a Linux.

Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha.

With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.

The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.

I look forward to tinkering and tweaking my home lab but I barely remember my interactions with Mac OS. I like it that way.

It surely beats tinkering with my life.

It is baffling to me how many backend devs who work with containers all day don't understand that using containers on mac (and windows) requires a full-blown virtual machine. While in linux you just run them.

I just want a macbook pro, but Linux. I want the performance, thermals, silence, fantastic screen, touchpad, speakers, etc. I refused to give anything up the mac hardware offers, and the PC OEM industry has just chosen, time and time again, to not bother to compete.

Hopefully these new Nvidia laptops will run Linux, that surface ultra is the first time I feel like a laptop on the other side of the fence will finally offer hardware parity.

Of course, it would've been better not to need it in the first place. However the experience is much better now (and Omarchy is great!)

Is this the new “just compile it from source”?

Agents in this case are just accelerators.

This year, I wanted to run an experiment that was extremely low stakes. I had CC ssh into a VPS and do everything for me. It worked.

Did it have any security gaps? I don't know, I didn't audit. It didn't matter. It was a personal project that had no personal data to risk and the project lasted ~1month (I'd actually audit if I was keeping it). I saw no signs that my server became a bot, fwiw.

I've had agents figure out git repos that were interesting to me but not worth putting in effort on my own. Not things I depend on, just things that I otherwise wouldn't have tested. It's too bad the subsidized pricing is coming to an end. There's a lot that I wouldn't have bothered doing myself that was cheap to have an agent do that won't be worth it again. I'll try out a fraction of the stuff by hand like before and that's fine, but it was a fun ~six months.

Needless to say my M3 also sucks compared to a very good desktop.

The M3 Ultra is no slouch. It sits at the top with best processors on both single-core and multi-core x64 processors.

Meanwhile my mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, which is nowhere near an M3 Ultra, feels much snappier using it as a day to day desktop in both Linux and Windows. I think this speaks more to the sluggishness of the macOS experience rather than hardware performance.

But, then I start doing something data/gpu/local LLM intensive and my M3 Max shines.

I too prefer Linux + KDE, overall it has been cause _less_ problems than macOS for me and I like the extra customizability.

The only thing keeping my work computer a mac is that I need to run iOS simulators.

I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.

My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year

I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.

My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.

Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.

So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.

Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.

For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.

Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.

No price tag can make me use insufferable MacOS, the same as iOS.

That said, I’ll never work on Windows. 15ish years ago I did some .net work. C# was a fun language but development on windows is a special kind of torture.

> The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully.

This is a really interesting insight! Never would have thought of that.

I have yet to read about someone who priced out something "as good" as the MacBook Air in terms of component quality and efficiency. What would the price premium be... over 50%?

BTW, I bought a 15" Chromebook, 1080p but is better than the really bad ones my kids used at school. It runs android apps for streaming video and Chrome browses faster than on my Mac.

Yup, I got Thinkpad X9, the idea being "Air 15 but with Windows". It does the job. I still think Air 15 is better (and cheaper), but the software compatibility and not needing to switch platforms outweighs that.

The remaining stuff... I'd say Lenovo has caught up for the most part.

Ideally passing through as much of the hardware as possible, and booting right into that config. Running it natively is ideal, but projects like Asahi are forced to play catch up porting another OS to new devices.

Presumably because the Neo sets a new low price boundary, used M1s Macbook Airs are only a couple of hundred pounds. For a system that is still really competitive.

I haven’t had to look at it for 5 years now. It’s still 200% more powerful than what they need.

As a “power user” Apple’s recent output has been frustrating. But for casual users it’s an unbeatable ecosystem.

This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.

Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.

My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.

Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today.

My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.

If you can't tell the difference between Google Sheets and Excel, you probably won't notice the difference between Mac and Windows Excel. But if you are in some role like finance where you spend a ton of time in Excel, the gaps become obnoxiously noticeable. Especially because VBA is completely non-existent on Mac.

Having said that software lagging in versions/features doesn't mean users are less efficient using the older tool. Are todays office users more efficient in word and excel with the ribbon than they were using office97 a few decades ago? Has it been measured? I know I am still lost whenever I need to find something on the ribbon.

Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?

I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.

My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).

What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.

If your standard developer laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but a certain team needs more disk space due to the work they're doing, you can just add a second nvme for a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of replacing the whole laptop.

Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.

Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.

Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?

I think part of the problem is all our laptops have smart card slots on them, and that limits the available options.

But even I haven’t done that in several years now, once IT moved to providing 16GB memory and SSD’s as a baseline, there’s really nothing left in a box to upgrade. I’m quite happy enough to not have to care.

This is especially true if the business is writing down the replaced hardware as depreciated capital, compared to say simply adding a stick of RAM.

Aside from that, almost always a new PC - almost! When times haven't been so good, I've had spot upgrades.

All of the above is just a question of running the numbers and minimising for cost, I'm sure.

We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.

Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.

The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.

You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.

We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.

Oh well, it's not my money.

As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops).

If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation.

Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.

We use basic AV and monitoring, as required for carrying insurance.

We don't have any desktops.

Our comparisons are done regularly to show the difference to new employees and to ensure that we aren't biased in what we report for budgeting.

This is the first time I have ever heard Adobe files on Windows.

There were a period of time between 2015 - 2020 that might have been the case. Especially due to poor Intel GPU acceleration on Mac.

Since Apple Silicon, Adobe Apps on Mac has been constantly faster than Windows counterparts. With plenty of examples on Youtube and Reddit when people disocver it. I mean Adobe work best on Mac I thought was given, given the historic ties between the two.

Put any kind of security software on the Mac and remove the bloat from Windows (normal for enterprises), and the Windows machines are faster.

You can blame the security software if you like, but you have to have it to carry insurance. And you have to have it to make a fair comparison anyway.

It's obvious that they will be faster. They come with a free video card at the same price point as the Macs that don't.

Your experience is valid, I don't doubt that, but you can't just toss a mac into a windows optimized environment and expect it to work, you have to take that extra bit of time to do things differently.

Either way, sounds like you made the right choice then for your own org, but for the vast majority of companies introducing macs generally aren't a loss and tend to have a higher ROI.

I'm going to run your recommendations through some research tomorrow. It would be so cool if we can get local file sharing to work, even Mac to Mac would be amazing.

We have directories with 30k+ large images and video content that we need to share. Macs can't open them.

You'll need MDM, installed anti-virus/anti-malware, and reasonable update policies, as with any endpoint. But have passed multiple years' audits with mostly-macOS fleet.

Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water.

[0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.

Even the first one I owned was straightforward

I told him to just get a Mac- it’s a little more expensive but the user experience is unparalleled, and the Genius Bar offers (do they still?) classes in using your computer if needed.

Never had to help him with buggy software, crashes, etc. It just worked.

Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.

This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.

I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.

The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all.

The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system.

Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.

The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

The 16.04 is still supported and it was released in 2016! So it must have been an even older system, right?

The moment it runs an update all bets are off. It's always audio for me, it breaks in the weirdest ways.

Mac updates are the best in the industry, period.

Close to zero chance of having an issue (unless you're messing with third-party kernel extensions).

There were millions of other annoying small things in Ubuntu itself as well. I’m sorry to say but as much as I love nix systems Ubuntu wasn’t really for general public - maybe it’s better today, not sure. Heard the story over and over again - that it’s superior, and every time I try it I’m utterly disappointed.

At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.

I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.

We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.

EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.

The sad thing is that newer macOS versions do still work really well on these unsupported machines - OpenCore Legacy Patcher proves it. All Apple would need to do is spend some time testing things, there's nothing to actually implement to make it work.

Isn't Apple supposed to be a services company now anyway, making money off of this installed base with cloud subscriptions?

If nothing else, it'd be nice if those iMacs could be reused as external displays, but nope. No display-in on them, so no dice (at least not without a lot of dicking about).

They even get serious security updates even after that period, and you can install linux if you really want to, but it makes no sense to me.

Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.

It is also worth noting that the USA is not the only country collecting data on US persons (and everyone else.)

The question is not, does the USA know about you, the question is really, how many governments know all about you and how does that information manifest in your life?

Yes, and its probably fair to assume that Apple and/or the government can access any of your files on your devices or in the cloud. My suggestion is not to use any "provider." Use free software, and keep your data locally on encrypted drives.

For the vast majority of people, the hassle simply isn't worth it, especially when the massive reduction in convenience is paired with basically no improvement in security.

It used to be,

> Do you fear technology?

> > Yes

> Is your daddy rich?

> > Yes

> MacOS

I guess we can remove the second question now.

I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.

For example, one of the most common example is icloud subtly enabled by default for syncing photo and data, and that will get your mac and iphone stuck in a complicated mess when things get full with the limited free space.

I also did dev on Windows, I know the internals pretty well (I even did embedded on CE, writing portable code across CE/95/NT family runtimes).

I still prefer Mac, it's much less likely to randomly break, mainly due to the fact that the hardware the software runs on is extremely predictable. I also like the care about muggle usability that Apple tends to pursue (granted, not perfect, but way better than the other two)

It's also why I don't use Linux for a desktop unless I have to. I've had years of debugging weird issues with drivers, editing /etc files, changing X settings and so on.

MacOS isn't perfect. In fact, I think Apple keeps making it worse because they have no real product vision now and it's just a bunch of teams making local changes to justify their own existence. But you can look at MacOS in one of two ways: as a better Windows (by having a UNIX-like core) or as a better Linux (by having a better UI subsystem). Either way it's a win (IMHO).

I'm torn on the Macbook Neo, personally. It really is just a giant iPhone 18 with a keyboard. Plus you can get a Macbook Air at times for $900. That's $200 more than the high-end Neo. Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.

For anything that's not pure consumption, that's a massive upgrade. A proper keyboard makes a world of difference. You don't need it if all you do is browse and view, and you can manage if you only need to send an email here and there, but I'd never want to program or write longer texts (emails, essays, spreadsheets for that matter) on an iPad, even if I hooked up a keyboard, unless I'm desperate and have no other options.

The mac has helped her improve here computer skills and confidence in a way that Windows never did.

It's not a perfect laptop, but I promise you people who spend $600 on their computer have never seen anything comparable.

There’s lots of stuff not to like about macOS, but there’s something about it that makes it click much more for average people.

For my partner in particular I noticed that they use way more features than they ever did with windows. Boring stuff like spotlight search to find files, space bar to preview documents, airdrop to send stuff to an iPhone, etc.

With windows I got called over constantly for questions like “how do I find x, I forgot where I put it”, “can you help me get this on my phone, I want to send it to <friend>”.

It’s not like good solutions for this don’t exist elsewhere, but something about MacBooks make people better at discovering those features.

I have secret pet theory that part of it is actually just that people know about Apple stuff that it’s supposed to be intuitive and so they have more confidence in trying to figure it out, which makes them have more success at it and that turns into a positive cycle.

chromebooks likely need even less attention