It's every Ask HN thread, every time I want to ask a question here I give up because I find myself listing the obvious, requirement-breaking answers that I know will come but that I don't want to see.
It's not like stack-overflow where often the users are beginners and don't know what they want and it's sometimes helpful to point out XY problems. Here people are technically literate and know what they want yet the requirements are still ignored.
IMO it goes beyond Ask HN. If you make a post and you know people are going to make a particular reply, it doesn't matter if you preemptively address that reply right in your post; you're going to get that reply anyway. People skim, they don't read, and they don't think deeply about posts. They're just pattern matching on a couple words and slamming out a reply. The reply is practically locked and loaded before you even made the post.
Agree. Also I feel like most ask hn are just questions and that’s it. No need to sift through the asker’s specifications on how they’d like everyone to answer. So I feel like when an asker expects that, it’s not likely to be respected by all. It’s just a quirk of hn.
I guess that if someone can’t articulate why they do or don’t want something, someone who is passionate about that thing sees their chance to help someone see the light. I then guess that the solution to giving requirements like “not a mac” is to also articulate why at a level that the audience will respect.
OP has already made the mistake of asking for something very broad in the title, then asking for something very specific in the body. If the title read “Linux laptop” I doubt they would have as many people in the comments suggesting anything else.
If the title read “Linux laptop” I doubt they would have as many people in the comments suggesting anything else.
Sorry, but that's a cop-out. As others have point out, the real problem is "people just don't read these days". Not even the top few lines of a post. If they did, they would have had no problem finding this important qualifier:
I don't agree - I think if the original poster adhered to something like "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way: Use meaningful, specific subject headers" [0] then we would not even be having this conversation because the original poster would have found their target audience of Linux Laptop Recommenders rather than a bunch of people that arrived to comment their favorite laptop and found that they were cut off by the original poster with no real explanation for WHY Windows/MacOS are not acceptable.
It would be similar to "Ask HN: Which text editor should I use for software development" with a body that contains "I have no intention of using an IDE or mouse". It's a poorly formed request if your intent is to ask for recommendations amongst the keyboard driven tiled editors.
I suspect its because a shamefully large percentage of Ask HN and Show HN are stupid or lazy
"Guys how do I learn math?"
"Are there any apps that let you type in numbers and add them together?"
"Is there any way I can ask questions to strangers on the web so I dont have to type the equivalent into the Google search bar or look it up on Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, library etc etc etc etc?"
granted my most generous interpretation of this phenomenon is that many of these cases are "kids at keyboard" phenomenon. but its frustrating at times seeing it repeat endlessly here.
The same reason console wars exist. If there are multiple choices, and it's not practical to take/use/buy all the options, people feel the need to justify the choice that they did make. When someone's starting from a defensive position, unemotional rationality is uncommon.
it's really not the same as console wars. You touch and interact with a laptop far more often than a video game console. That alone makes the comparison invalid.
While i am no apple fanatic, i will readily admit that much of their hardware is designed extremely well from an ergonomic standpoint. Barring obvious failures like their push to make things needlessly thin, a lot of their hardware is durable and holds its value well. Personally, i have a macbook from 2014 that i still use daily for basic tasks and its keyboard is very well built.
While some user behaviour is fanatical, one cannot deny that apply invest a lot into usability of their hardware and software and it shows. Can't say the same for a lot of windows laptops.
Tangentially, I'm not certain it even exists outside of sociopaths. A certain amount of emotion or beliefs underlies most rational arguments.
The problem is when emotional rationality devolves to either shallowness (i.e. fleeting trends) or fanaticism ("there is only one true option forever").
But shallowness and fanaticism are always present because they are both easier routes to self appeasement in a world that usually pushes people towards lower self concept.
As a developer/gamer I use all these systems and with every year I'm less and less motivated to use macOS. Linux is clear winner for everything I need server related and Windows is fine for everything client related. macOS is in this weird spot where it lacks most of the server side stuff (lack of hosting, poor virtualization support etc.), but it also lacks some of the client side things (poor gaming, no hardware customization etc.).
Yeah I am kind of in this boat as well - Windows is held back by some legacy stuff but has also gotten better and better. It also has a bunch more spyware crap (but if you know what to do thankfully you can disable most of that). It used to be back in the day you had to choose between a smooth OSX experience or a bloated adware filled windows XP.
Linux has also gotten dramatically easier as well of course and is free. I still like MacOS generally but I always thought it was a mistake to completely ignore server-adjacent stuff that powerusers would want. If I buy a Mac and own MacOS why can't I also run a MacOS VM on that same machine? Would be pretty cool to have 3 or 4 running simultaneously with these new processors.
Last I checked, and it's been a couple years, the MacOS license allows you to run up to three MacOS images on your MacOS hardware. We do that on our MacOS build servers we use for building iOS apps since you can't have multiple versions of Xcode installed simultaneously.
Consider the possibility that people can like Macs for reasons entirely unrelated to Apple's marketing tactics. Reasons can include things most people would agree are legitimate qualities to look for in computers, like build quality, display quality, keyboard quality, performance, battery life, etc. Those seem to me as more legitimate and less "fanatical" reasons to prefer computers from a particular manufacturer than the reason you provided, which is that you dislike some (certainly not all, and likely a vanishingly small portion) people who also buy computers from that same manufacturer.
Here's a vote for a twenty year, seven Mac user who buys for those reasons, not the marketing or wanting to fit in. In fact, circa 2005, I got the side-eye for wanting to get on a cafe's wifi or, god forbid, print something at FedEx Kinko's from my Mac.
For me — FOR ME — it's a great platform that lets me focus on all sorts of things that I want to accomplish with computers.
You hit the nail on the head. I love the physical build, performance, and overall quality. I also feel very comfortable in MacOS, I don’t like how Windows renders fonts, and I could just never get into Ubuntu.
In my case, I went from a 2015 to a 2019 MacBook Pro. I recognize there were significant keyboard issues in between those years, but my 2019 machine works very well. The only thing is it gets very hot when I’m compiling code. But for the most part I don’t use it on my lap, and this specific issue doesn’t bother me ad much as having a cheaper keyboard, lower quality display, etc.
These days I see way more people spouting the "omg mac users are fanatics!!!!" line than I see actual mac "fanatics". It got very stale years ago, honestly.
It's natural human behavior to talk about things we like in relevant contexts, but I really don't see much of it happening anywhere near the top of this comments section. Just ignore it and move on.
Have you not noticed the rabid Linux fan base on HN?
It seems like every discussion about Macs or macOS has at least 2-3 comments about how someone had used macOS for years, then got sick of apples (intel) hardware or lack of software customizability and switched to a Linux machine running Debian/Fedora/Ubuntu/Manjaro and they are never looking back (except for commenting on every Mac related post on HN).
The only reason we don’t see many Windows fanatics on here is because the user base is more dev focused here and most people prefer *NIX based machines. If this was a gaming focused forum, you would see a lot more Windows fanaticism.
> If this was a gaming focused forum, you would see a lot more Windows fanaticism.
Eh. Gaming forums are full of complaints about windows and what a pain in the ass it is. Old games break, new games break, drivers break, malware concerns, bloated device drivers (glaring at you, Razer) and gamers don't like all the bloatware and analytics crap.
The reason you don't see Windows fanatics on here is because so many people hate dealing with it.
People seem genuinely excited that Steam is pushing more games to Linux.
> result of some marketing tactics Apple employed for decades
Or perhaps people really like macOS and their value system is different. I don't think a lot of developers are buying macs due to marketing.
Also, Linux attracts the same fanatic behavior. If you like linux, you don't notice see how many people are pushing it. If you like macOS, you're more likely to notice the people pushing linux because you disagree with them. (And notice the macOS crowd less.)
My past three workplaces let me choose between a high-end Windows laptop, or a Macbook. I always opted for Windows, due to some tooling I'm used to, but ended up regretting it on every occasion
The problems with non-Apple laptops are manifold. Surprisingly, there's very little practical difference between $1k and $4k laptop. System integrators don't spend their budget wisely - they cheap out on some parts, while overspending on other parts purely to drive benchmark numbers, without affecting overall user experience in meaningful ways. Windows laptops get about half the battery life of Macbooks at comparable prices, and Linux is even worse than that. Every Windows laptop I've ever had experienced some problems with drivers after Windows updates (usually Wifi, Bluetooth, webcam or audio) - Linux is even worse. Issues with sleeping, hibernating, or waking up for no discernible reason. Intel Turbo/SpeedStep screwing up thermals and battery life. And more
As much as I dislike Apple, when it comes to laptops, the competition is woefully behind
As much as I kind of hate beating a dead horse, the driver and power issues on Linux are very much a matter of hardware choice.
I suspend and hibernate my ThinkPad constantly, from once to several times a day, with no concerns. My uptimes are usually limited by wanting to have a kernel (or some other low-level) update actually take effect once in a while.
My OS install is old enough that I can't actually remember what kinds of tweaks I may have made power-wise apart from installing TLP, but I get comparable battery life on Linux and Windows. I don't think I'm that far from stock configuration. It used to be worse -- my current OS install was originally on a different laptop -- and battery life was perhaps ~20-25% worse on Linux than on Windows, but I don't see much of a difference nowadays. Intel CPU power states are managed by the CPU itself nowadays anyway.
If there is a difference, it's usually because sometimes script-heavy web pages left open on the background seem to cause Firefox to keep hogging more CPU time on Linux than on Windows.
Sure, hardware choices will be limited. You do have to be selective, and the realistic hardware options may or may not satisfy you, so it's entirely reasonable if e.g. an Apple combination of hardware and software turns out to be more attractive.
Not everything is perfect, of course, but it does sound baffling to hear that "Linux" has these constant issues that I haven't experienced in years in daily use. It's true that you have to pick your hardware, and there's probably still a higher chance of hardware compatibility issues if you haven't paid anybody to make sure the combination works, but in my experience, those stereotypical issues are pretty far from being a universal truth.
> I've never seen a developer with a macbook in my country.
In the U.S., at least, whenever I see photos from development conferences (which, admittedly, has been a few years) at least half of all open laptops would be Apples.
In where I live there's a ton of devs using macs. The idea sounds absurd, too.
Even more absurd when you realize they're mostly developing stuff that will ultimately run on Linux.
Working for a pretty big corporation (20000ish employees), the reason for this I hear from our IT/Workplace Services team is that Apple laptops actually integrate with the existing Windows-centric IT infra reasonably well with regards to account management, hdd encryption, endpoint protection, etc. This is not true for really any flavor of Linux, or so I'm told.
So it's either a HP ZBook or a Macbook, and a big chunk of our devs go with the Macbook when those are the choices.
I worked for BigCorp (not FAANG), and developers chose Macs for exactly the opposite reason - they did not integrate into BigCorp's dysfunctional IT infrastructure because they were too new.
Over the years, BigCorp IT had deployed increasing amounts of corporate malware for various reasons. Users would be regularly treated to dialogs from various IT departments (accounting, security, inventory, licensing) demanding that they verify their employee number, job code, physical location, etc; security agents that scanned all disk activity and network traffic; inventory agents that make sure all software was properly licensed; and arbitrary software installations and upgrades that IT incorrectly believed everyone in the company needed.
With a Mac, none of these agents existed, so you didn't have to deal with your computer actively working against you. With newer forms of enterprise management, this overhead should be reduced on both Windows and Macs, but due to inertia all those agents will continue to be installed on Windows long after they are needed.
I was so against Macs when I was younger. I'd only used Windows and FreeBSD for most of my teen years. So when I was 19, and went to Singapore to work... they used iMacs. I'm all like "ew" but my boss told me once I got used to it, I probably wouldn't wanna go back. He was right. I even bought the iMac home to NZ with me as my carry on luggage (those white iMacs) heh.
Though, for the very first time in a long time I had a job with a windows laptop early last year for about 6 months. Holy shit it was a nightmare - if it'd just been Windows, I'd have been fine, but every day there was some new bullshit IT had implemented. I spent so much time fighting that thing, or just being completely lost. The network even had its own MITM thing going on which really messed with vscode (thank god for win-ca extension) - I think they were scanning in real-time to make sure you weren't doing security breaches.
Regardless, it was so over the top it's not funny. This place had less than 20 people, but these insane IT overheads.
With my current job I have been given a top of the line XPS and I gotta say, that screen looks so much better than my 2020 MBP. It's really nice. A few of my colleagues have put Linux on it, but then they can't connect to work VPN, etc. I only use the laptop for connecting to our databases and I just code on my macbook. This is a far bigger company, and they have a great IT team with none of that silliness from the smaller company.
To clarify, no one is picking a Macbook because it integrates with the existing IT infra, we are simply not allowed to use anything that doesn't integrate with the various corporate malware. And since they couldn't get Linux to play nice with those requirements, it's not even offered as an option.
Our devs are picking Macbooks because it's the lesser pain in the butt, many would go with Linux if allowed.
Things like Office 365 are also still pretty much a hard requirement at lots of offices. More enterprisey projects can definitely require working with all kinds of moderately complex technical or non-technical documents in Word or Excel.
It may be possible to get it running on Wine or CrossOver Office, of course, but most generic Windows-centric corporations probably aren't going to buy Crossover, and "I can't send you a commented version of this document by today because I'm having a random compatibility issue with this non-commercial software combination that other Normal People don't need" isn't going to make you popular.
O365 works cross platform in the browser well enough for most windows-centric corps. I've got by happily for years with Vivaldi and Libreoffice, without Windows installed.
Server side dev here, I use mac. I picked up using mac when I was working in a company making hf forex systems where everyone used a mac.
Why? Because Linux desktop is garbage (I daily one now too) and gets in the way. Mac you can do anything you need to do in Linux, open terminal nooo problems buddy. brew install whatever you want then switch to a nice interface with a good touchpad that you don't have to half compile yourself.
So after going it alone why did I shell out a stupid amount of money to continue using a mac when my company wasn't providing one? Because now my livelyhood depends on my laptop. I don't want things getting in the way, I don't want things breaking or having to boot into a virtual machine to get something done.
When there's $s involved it's a different caluclation. Total income = hours worked - purchase cost of laptop - hours fluffing around with my dev environment
Therefore, if my linux laptop was to die (like one of my dev's linux laptops did on Monday night) and then I was to miss a day of work, I could afford the difference between a linux craptop and a mac in lost productivity.
As for poor countries not using the best tools, I would say this is systemic. People in Colombia don't appreciate it, you see very few of the locals here using macbooks. But their time is also billed a lot lower.
A Swiss guy one told me that "the right tool is half the job", as much as the Colombians idolise the Germans and Swiss, they've still got a lot to learn.
> Therefore, if my linux laptop was to die (like one of my dev's linux laptops did on Monday night) and then I was to miss a day of work, I could afford the difference between a linux craptop and a mac in lost productivity.
As a Linux laptop user with an overbearing asshat of a boss, I fucking love this misconception. Getting my working environment set back up after a fresh install is a git clone and 2 minute Ansible run (the majority of the time is spent on packages downloading).
Fortunately, however, if I want to ditch my boss for the day, I can blame Linux. Don't wanna be on video for that call? Sorry, Linux. Don't wanna attend the call at all? Sorry, Linux must have $(bofh excuse).
I'd have absolutely zero motivation to do this if it weren't for my boss blaming everything on Linux out of the gate, but hey, if that's what he wants to do, I'm gonna lean the fuck into it.
Some people have very basic setups and use everything out of the box and that's fine. I could have an editor with git checked out and publish code in probably 20 minutes.
But there's so much extra stuff to have everything functioning like keymap, licensing, vpn, restoring file backups, password manager, slack, web browser with security / personalisation settings, aliases, zshrc, ssh keys, every other program that I need to function as a dev (zoom etc). At a speedrun my local machine would take more than 2 hours to setup. That would be after I sourced a replacement, installed whatever os.
As for my dev missing the day, that wouldn't be a happening thing. If he wants to take time off he's entitled to but turning up for work means turning up ready to go. I handed him my spare linux laptop and told him to fix his one in his own time. No B players on my team.
Anyone targeting iOS absolutely has to use macs. And a lot of agencies have some developers who target iOS and just standardise on everyone running macs to simplify their IT.
I'd say that's just wrong. Linux is great and certainly my favorite OS to do real work, but few would consider the IS above reproach. There's always something that could be better. The dogma in Linux is usually around how free something is, not the smug sense of "our thing is the best and dismiss the rest", which seems rife with apple fans as a category.
> They seem to want to push everyone to use Mac, like religious fanatics try to push everyone to their "truth".
As soon as you can adequately explain why there are people that are vehemently anti-Apple, you will have the answer to this question. You make it sound like it's only pro-Apple people that are fanatics.
This is just it though! You're not describing "Apple fanatics versus Windows fanatics," you're describing "Apple fanatics versus people with an irrational and excessive hatred of Apple fanaticism." Why does this culture exist specifically around Apple?
> Why does this culture exist specifically around Apple?
It doesn't. It also exists around Linux, in general and around each distro. It exists around Windows. It exists around FreeBSD (but you may not have heard from them recently)... It basically exists everywhere.
If you look at a thread about ARM, you will see it there, and the corresponding x86 one too. (And if you are lucky, you will catch some actual x86, not amd64, fans and anti-fans too). Haskell, Rust, Javascript, and PHP threads have those groups too.
It exists to some extent around Linux, because "Linux user" is an identity that some people care about, but I dispute that there are "Windows fans" and "Windows anti-fans" the way that there are Apple fans and anti-fans. Using Windows just isn't core to anyone's identity.
The interesting difference between the identities of "Linux user" and "Apple customer" is that one came from grassroots hacker subculture and the other is the product of corporate marketing.
can't speak for others. but personally I'm forced to use macbooks at my last 2 companies. Tried to make the case for getting a dell XPS with linux installed but they refused to support it. Other than that I have senior family members that have trouble figuring out how to use an iphone, between the lack of SD card slot forcing them to navigate how to pay and use iCloud, and figuring out all the dongles with the lack of headphone jack now. They would keep harassing me to help them with their issues.
It's hard to see experience on the internet. I agree, it's definitely a two way street with regard to fanaticism. The people that "shout" the loudest often drown out the more reasonable responses.
Myself, I have been back and forth between PC (windows) and Apple several times. My priorities have changed over the years and I find PC's fit my requirements to a better extent since 2014. If Apple can bring back a notebook like HP ZBook or Dell Precision I would consider moving. Until then, I will live with the tradeoff's...
I agree with you, even if I came to a different conclusion on which ecosystem fits my needs better at this moment. I respect that everyone has their own needs, and they will make the best choice for themself. I hate the shouting on the 'net.
I usually stay the heck out of the debate because it devolves to namecalling so quickly, but something about HN makes me want to participate -- the promise of a civil discussion.
> As soon as you can adequately explain why there are people that are vehemently anti-Apple, you will have the answer to this question.
Oh, oh! I know this one.
Apple's devices are extremely closed. This is antithetical to the spirit of personal computing. But this is only one component: what ultimately pushes Apple to generate an anti-Apple crowd is the combination of them being a closed platform, them using every dirty trick in the book to suck users into their closed ecosystem, and them being extremely successful at it.
Want to make an iOS app? Buy a Mac. No, not an old Mac, a new one.
Want to send proper messages to an iPhone user? Get an iPhone. Or convince them to install Signal. (I'll wait! LOL.)
Want to make a video call to an iPhone user? Get an iPhone. (Or ask them to install Duo, haha!)
Want to install Mac OS? Buy our hardware.
None of this would matter so much if we were talking about coffee makers. But we're talking about personal computing, a very central component of our nerd lives. If you're a youngster you're probably happy with occasional hardware replacement and messes of dongles, but for many of us our computing experiences are rooted in opening up the box and switching the guts around, or booting different software on the box, and we don't especially appreciate having to constantly battle the hardware vendor to make this happen.
Apple products seem to be very high-quality. But that's not really the point.
> If you're a youngster you're probably happy with occasional hardware replacement and messes of dongles, but for many of us our computing experiences are rooted in opening up the box and switching the guts around, or booting different software on the box, and we don't especially appreciate having to constantly battle the hardware vendor to make this happen.
I'm pushing 50 and 35 years ago I was building PCs (and selling them, too!). I love building PCs. Still do, it's fun. Tinkering is very enjoyable. I technically have more Linux machines than Macs (though admittedly that requires counting Rasberry Pis).
But. For my 'daily driver' computing, I'm pretty happy in the Apple ecosystem. They sell me 'just works' with a polished interface and I can focus my tinkering on the stuff I want to tinker with. And by infecting my extended family with this opinion, I've lowered my technical support load quite a lot.
It's the same reason that years ago I stopped modding my daily driver car, and moved that passion into a hobby instead.
1. Why do some people seem to be so fanatical about their love for Macs?
2. Why do some people seem to be so vocally fanatical online about their love for Macs?
As far as #1 goes, I think it's just about finding something that you have to use every day that you are much happier with. I have found small pieces of software that have made me jump for joy simply because they resolved a small problem; it's not hard to understand why someone would become so fanatical about switching to a a completely new piece of hardware and OS that they feel works so much better than what they were previously using.
I used to have long and aggressive arguments with my college roommate about why Windows was superior to OS X and said that I would never even consider owning an Apple product. I've been using a Mac now for work and personal use for a little over a decade and I dread every time I need to use my Windows machine for certain work tasks.
I think this is perfectly understandable and I don't think there's anything wrong with people going through the process of finding something that changes the way they do something major in their lives.
#2, however, tends to be more unpleasant when it becomes vitriolic/persistent. I think this is just a symptom of the happiness that exists from feeling like you've found the greener grass (and wanting to share that with others) mixed with an inability to understand the negative aspects of aggressively stating to complete strangers that the preferences of others are objectively wrong. I think this is inevitable considering the Mac is still considered the "alternate" option for some reason, and it's paired (inevitably) with those that feel that the fanaticism for the alternate option is unwarranted.
I think the tech sector has always attracted both skeptics and idealists/innovators, and that's bound to create an environment where you'll have groups that feel like it's their duty to inform others of what they feel is the better way and groups of people that feel like it's their duty to temper unwarranted fanaticism.
>I've been using a Mac now for work and personal use for a little over a decade and I dread every time I need to use my Windows machine for certain work tasks.
For me it's the opposite. Maybe I'm missing something obvious or I've had back luck with peripherals, but when trying to do something as simple as disabling mouse acceleration involves nonsense like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/it420s/how_to_quickl... it's just baffling to me. I am noticeably less productive on Mac computers because of weird quirks like the mouse acceleration.
In that thread, you'll see people for whom that fix does work, and doesn't work, and other fixes that for some people do work, and don't work, and people that have no idea what's going on.
Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, but when I switch from working on the Android version of my apps on Windows, to working on the iOS version of my apps on Mac, I feel like I'm using an aesthetically pleasing toy that just wasn't meant for productivity.
It's part guilt. Doubting your expensive purchase, thus reinforcing it with this behavior. Apt comparison with religion, especially with recent converts.
Except, there is not a single Windows/Intel based laptop that can offer the same performance as say, for example, an M1 Macbook air ($750).
There really is no comparison and there is nothing that comes close on the Windows side at that price point. If there is, please link me because I would love to know.
M1 has made Macbooks not only superior in performance, but also more economically viable than Windows.
To provide a counter argument, the base spec M1 MacBook Air is 1130 Euros on Apple EU website, not $750, and that's with a pitiful 8Gigs of RAM and 256Gig SSD which, IMHO that SSD space is what phones come equipped with these days, and too low for a dev machine/daily driver computer, without needing to ductape a slower external USB SSD to your laptop, and 8Gigs of RAM is too low for the year 2022 + futureproofing a couple of years into the future (I had that amount of RAM on a PC from 2009).
Instead, I got a Ryzen 5800U based 13" machine for 780 Euros which came with a much more spacious 1TB NVME and 16Gigs of RAM for that added piece of mind when spinning up some VMs. That's much better value for me for a workhorse, plus it runs any linux flavor natively. The equivalently specked M1 Air would be 1820 Euros.
And best of all, the screen hinge rotates full 180 degrees, which for me was a must vs the screen on the Macbook and most other laptops that for some reason stick to 110 degrees and limits the positions I can use it from.
Sure, the Ryzen 5800U won't reach the same Geekbench scores as the M1, but the performance still puts it in the top percentile of CPUs on the market right now including the M1, and plus, CPU cycles are infinite while RAM and storage are finite.
As an added bonus I can also play nearly any game on Steam on it despite the device being barely thicker than the Type-C port.
You need to refresh your knowledge because macbooks have fastest ssd on the market so the ram and ssd memory is shared. You can run apps that require 64gb of ram with same performance as with native 64gb ram
>You can run apps that require 64gb of ram with same performance as with native 64gb ram
You should inform yourself about how RAM and SSDs work and read actual benchmark instead of parroting some wild claims that even Apple's marketing does not mention since having NAND storage at DRAM speed is just absurd.
Plus, using your SSD as RAM not only takes a performance hit but induces premature NAND wear turning your unrepairable M1 MacBook into e-waste sooner.
Fair point. You would need to spend quite a bit more on a comparable PC if buying new. However, the breath of applications and interchangeability of the PC may render the price point moot.
For example, I just changed the notebook graphics card on a refurbished HP ZBook... I paid $275 for a Gen 3 and upgraded the Graphics card for another $350. It was a lot easier than I thought and this computer is a beast.
The new M1 Mac’s really are impressive. I suspect I might be similarly impressed by the latest AMD chips with 8 cores, but quite a lot of my everyday workloads are seeing 5x-10x performance increases over my previous 2015 MacBook.
I have the M1 Pro with (8 + 2) cores. But seeing as the cores are identical I suspect with the base models with (4 + 4) cores you'd see very similar performance except you'd be looking at 5x rather than 10x on multicore workloads.
Have the cheapest M1. It flies and the battery life is stellar. The only downside I would say is it's only 8GB of RAM. If you're doing anything with electron development, it's a no-go. You'll need a minimum of 16GB.
It's an incredible machine though. The perf and battery life remind me of the upgrade I got when switching from a HDD to a SSD for the first time. It changes how I use the device.
PCs are usually cheaper and can pull better benchmark numbers, but most Windows laptops have weird little issues and quirks that add up. I find myself a lot more productive on a Mac than a Windows laptop, which more than makes up for any price difference. I can add hacks to make Windows work, but even those aren't as intuitive as Mac productivity software.
Nope, they may just work for you tm, but not for all. As mentioned before, my work enforced 2019 macbook crashes minimum 3 times a week and my run of the mill windows PC hasn't "crashed" at all, like in the 3 years I've owned it, zero OS crashes. So I'm happy that you're content with your choice, but know yours is a decision paid with subjectivity wrapped very tightly. I'd love to see actual enterprises with large fleets of various real world used computers post metrics on failure rates, etc. I'd love to see it.
I guess it is, because of the lock-in factor of all things Apple. People like some part of the products, but other parts suck, like having to carry around silly adapters for stuff. Maybe it is some subconscious kind of thing: "If everyone was using what I am using, I would have no issues with having to bring adapters."
A bit like a snowball scheme, where you try to get more and more people to buy in and commit to it. Then they will be your cool Apple friends and you can exchange with them without problems.
Ultimately the lock-in of that whole ecosystem pushes people away from it though. Most knowledgeable people, who can avoid it will avoid it, because they do not want non-standard hardware, missing ports, 400€ monitor stands and stuff like that.
I use one at my desk because I want Ethernet and I use an external monitor, but when I take my laptop on the go I never bring dongles because I truthfully don't need them.
They definitely market the "brand" leading to quasi-religious fervour.
Of course, there's religious devotees to all 3. I throw my lot in with the Linux crowd because of freedom: freedom to use the software and not give a fuck about anyone's philosophy or religiousity. And the knowledge that it'll always be open source, I'll always "own" my software, etc...
"I throw my lot in with the Linux crowd because of freedom: freedom to use the software and not give a fuck about anyone's philosophy or religiousity. "
I am not sure if you really are expected to give a fck about those things when using any of the major OSes. MacOS does not require you to swear allegiance to the cause of gender equality, even if the company behind it does indeed favour it.
Now if you want to participate in developing free software, for good or bad, those things are no longer immaterial, and if you have unpopular ideas about religion or philosophy you will sooner or later be ostracised and some hip code of conduct thingy will be the last thing you will see there.
No but the company follows a certain direction and you need to buy-in to their idea of the future if you want the seamless experience they promise. For the full Apple "experience" you need multiple Apple devices, an Apple ID, etc...
Windows is slightly more open but similar; you need to buy-in to their ecosystem.
With Linux I can use Gnome, KDE or other... A bunch of distros. A bunch of browsers (without ads, annoyance, etc...). Anything that's an open standard basically works. There is maybe slight buy-in needed to work with my Chromecast (need Chrome on it) but that's an okay compromise.
> Now if you want to participate in developing free software, for good or bad, those things are no longer immaterial, and if you have unpopular ideas about religion or philosophy you will sooner or later be ostracised and some hip code of conduct thingy will be the last thing you will see there.
You can develop free software and ignore those things. Just work on your own thing. But you seem to mean "participate in existing project with existing organization" which is different than your first fragment.
It's not fanaticism really. A lot of us find it's the only computer that actually does a half decent job of trying to work properly and doesn't kick you in the balls. Well it does but rarely.
Honestly I'd rather be using Windows on a ThinkPad. I really really like windows, PuTTY, MS office etc and I even like spending time in Visual Studio. But the hardware quality has declined to near zero in the PC market and lets not even get into a discussion about the shit show that windows and the dev story on it has become in the last few years.
Please don't suggest WSL either. I have no energy for that and its associated problems.
Really it comes down to the least stinky turd. I wish one of the big vendors (MS / Apple / Linux Vendor X) would really try and concentrate on making the best user-centric experience because at the moment they're all failing. Apple is just failing less hard and when time is money, I'm just having to pay through the nose for a little bit of edge.
That’s the WSL I’m complaining about. Got VPN routing issues and background process problems. Plus the hyper-v vswitch keeps killing my networks. It’s not a real Linux. I’m done.
Macs have a certain set of features which is not even close to being matched by any other laptop, as far as I'm aware. Not everyone values these features, and for them, the Mac is just overpriced.
- solid and beautiful chassis, no plastic-y uninspired 2008-Dell design here.
- large, beautiful, high-DPI screen looks great and has crisp text. You can seamless rescale the UI to get effectively a 17" resolution or 13", depending on how big you want your UI elements to be.
- the trackpad feels fantastic to your fingers! Two-finger scrolling through a document is so natural and ergonomic. Whenever I use the stupid Windows mouse wheel, it's either 3 lines at once, which is not enough, or one page at a time, which is way too much; I've never used a Windows laptop with a trackpad, I hope scrolling on that doesn't work like the mouse wheel.
- macOS is a Unix that works. Sleep works out of the box, every time. Wifi works, and connects instantly when you open the lid. After configuring the settings on first install, I basically never do sysadmin again for the life of that version of the OS. (I re-install from scratch when I upgrade; I know the happy path will work, but as a software developer, I know upgrading has all kinds of edge cases)
- macOS has a very consistent look and feel, and looks elegant. It also has all sorts of little details that go practically unnoticed but add up to a better experience.
For non-technical users:
- there is an Apple store within about 2 hours where you can talk to a live person, try out the machine in person, etc. which makes you feel secure.
- I have had exactly one macOS tech support request in over ten years (some girl did not know how to free up disk space). Contrast with Windows, where the problem is practically un-debuggable, or Linux, where once your problem goes off the rails of the config UI you'd better know how to use the command line.
- Comes with a lot of useful software (Pages, Garage Band, iPhoto, etc.), unlike Windows which comes with nothing (and a few toy apps like Notepad and Paint).
- You don't need to be a tech expert to buy a Mac. Just get the size you want and it works.
Contrast this with Windows, where every program looks completely different (makes Linux look consistent). Windows is user-hostile (forced reboots, resists creating a local account, I cannot edit the Send To menu anymore, etc.) The user-experience of Windows is the equivalent of the Big Ball of Mud design pattern.
Contrast with Linux, where you can do absolutely anything you want, but nothing ever fully works. If you had more time you could fix those little corners, but it's just not worth it. Or you'd have to add features to this app. Or your favorite window manager (Sawfish) gets harder and harder to install. Or you fight with Pulse Audio / Jack / ALSA for this particular sound program.
And if your primary value is spending as little money as possible, Apple will drive you nuts. For what you get, the price is fair, it's just that there's no option for a lower trim model. Don't need Thunderbolt? Too bad, you're getting a fast interconnect whether you want it or not.
The thing is, there is something intangible about high-end stuff that goes from "this does what I want and I don't think about it" to "I enjoy the experience of using this". It's a little like wearing high-end fabrics, or eating at a high-end restaurant. Necessary? Absolutely not. But it's that enjoyment it gives that creates the "fanaticism".
- It's not 2008. Plenty of great looking PCs these days. My Xiaomi Mi Air 12 was IMO a better looking MacBook, clean and free of branding.
- Pretty much every modern Windows trackpad has two finger scrolling that works fine.
- You can also get mice with free scrolling wheels like the Logitech MX Master line that switch between free spinning and ratcheted. Sometimes ratcheted scrolling is better particularly for gaming or if you only want to scroll a small amount.
- Wifi works on my Linux laptops too. Sleep too. Just don't buy crap that doesn't work with Linux.
- Maybe there is an Apple store 2 hours away. Maybe there's one 5 hours away. Or a an hour flight away. Maybe 2 hours is still too far away for you so you're stuck mailing the stupid thing while your friend gets the Dell tech show up at his house.
- Just get the size you want and spend considerably more. Want a 16" laptop? Just spend $1500 more.
- Try explaining to your tech illiterate friend why their 13" M1 MBP only works with 1 monitor while their old 13" Intel MBP worked with two.
Well, if you don't appreciate what Apple is offering, then don't buy one. I was just explaining what people see in it. Judging by the upvotes, I'd say it's fairly representative of why people like them.
> Just don't buy crap that doesn't work with Linux.
See, this is exactly my point. Blame the user... I don't want to have to research what works well. Even if I know it works, it may take quite a while to figure out how to get it to work. It took me two weeks of recompiling kernels to get my T42 to go to sleep, and the trick was "acpi_sleep=s3" as a boot parameter. (Technically, it went to sleep just fine, it just hung in the kernel on wake, which was arguably worse) Judging by other comments sleep is still an issue. That's with one of the major features of a laptop...
(The wifi wasn't a problem per se, it's just that Ubuntu broke the auto-detection at one point. It was working prior, and they've since fixed that, but I've never had that problem on a Mac.)
> why their 13" M1 MBP only works with 1 monitor while their old 13" Intel MBP worked with two
How many people are trying to power two monitors off a 13" MBP? I'm not saying Apple doesn't have issues (I'm using a 2018 MBP that's had the keyboard replaced once, and the letters have dissolved off five keys so far, and I wasn't happy about needing to buy it because I wanted to wait until the keyboard problem was fixed, which it was six months later, but my 2012 MBP stopped displaying pixels thanks to a client project which involved compiling all day, triggering the nVidia heatsink problem), but if you're the kind of person that needs two monitors, cheaping out on the laptop doesn't seem like a great idea. Next you'll be telling me they don't have enough RAM on their 8 GB laptop to run all the programs that would make two monitors useful...
> At least you can use your favorite WM on Linux?
Actually, I cannot. My favorite WM is sawfish, which requires some package that is a major pain to compile (or maybe there are too many for me to spend the effort, and the only extant packages are 32-bit, can't remember). The default Ubuntu thing was awful, GNOME too dumbed down, KDE apps crash all the time for me (but maybe I have some setting in the .files I've been copying around for 20 years?) and KDE's aesthetics historically managed to make Windows look polished. No, I explicitly don't want a tiling WM. So I've settled on XFCE, which has about the visual polish of KDE, but at least it's lightweight. And I spend most of the time on the Mac, where the window manager does what I want. (With the exception of sawfish's raising the app under consideration during Alt-Tab, that's a great feature, don't have to look at those icons, just look for the window I want)
And I was explaining some of what's wrong with your post. It's pretty clear you haven't touched a PC laptop for like 15 years.
Is it crazy to expect a $1000 laptop these days can handle 2 external monitors? Especially when it's predecessor could? If you're just using 2 monitors to look at spreadsheets or a web browser why spend an extra $1000 for more CPU and RAM you might not even need? Even crappy Intel integrated graphics will do it so long as there's the video outputs.
Well said! The comment about Linux I feel is spot on and gave me a chuckle. “ Contrast with Linux, where you can do absolutely anything you want, but nothing ever fully works.”
I’ve ran MacBook for mobile dev and pc for in home for over a decade. Swapped to new m1pro and finally ditched my windows desktop. Still keep a local esxi server with windows dev vm in case. But Best upgrade I’ve had in awhile.
Just because you brought it up, sleep hasn't just worked for me on MacOS. I use to have a problem where it wouldn't connect to an external monitor again after sleep. I currently have a problem where my external keyboard isn't recognized until I unplug it and plug it back in.
Didn't have that problem with another keyboard on the same MacBook, and I haven't had that problem with the same keyboard on a Windows machine.
I have mac, linux, and windows machines at home and in the words of Three Dead Trolls "every OS sucks"
Please consider that this may be a personal problem you have. (maybe some self reflection is in order?) I didn't find the statement problematic at all.
Another part of it is that people have spent so much money buying into the Mac eco system and they find that its not the heavenly like existence they were led to believe it would be.
So they need external validation for their choice, which they get by seeing everyone else switching to the Mac ecosystem as well.
Apple hardware is nice. My last two systems have been Macintosh’s running bootcamp windows 100% of the time. I have a $5K MacBook Pro that’s probably one of the last I9 systems they’re gonna sell.
Some of the pro-Apple commentary that happens in discussions like this is just a response to the constant "you got suckered by Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field" style of comments. Anti-Apple folks like to insinuate (if not proclaim outright) that Apple users are less technical than Linux users, they're stupid, etc.
Meanwhile, some of us just wanted a decently polished desktop GUI that runs a unix command line natively. You could say that Windows now supports this, and Linux desktops have made some progress, but when I switched over to primarily using OSX for my workstation years ago, neither was remotely true. I stick with it because inertia, just like most everyone else.
> I stick with it because inertia, just like most everyone else.
Yep, I bet a lot of people are like that. That's why I use Linux on the desktop: I've been using it for like 6 years and I can't be bothered to try anything else since this is what I know.
At least people who proselytize for Linux or Windows aren't telling you to throw away your laptop so you can buy a new, $1,000+ replacement machine. Oh, you don't like it? That's because you didn't buy a $700 iPhone, and you didn't compliment it with your $300 Homepod. You didn't forget to buy a $400 Apple Watch, did you? That would almost be as ridiculous as forgetting to buy a $50 Magsafe charger! W-wait, you didn't buy that either? Good luck charging your phone, then... your Mac only ships with a USB-C cable.
I think the way this conversation played out was "given how I use my device, is there an optimal device to buy?" A lot of the answers are, in turn, "why don't you use your device differently? having ignored your use cases and preferences, this is the device I'd recommend."
It might be a valid opinion to say "I don't use Linux and I enjoy using MacOS on Apple Silicon" but... it doesn't actually help the original poster, does it? So why post that at all?
I guess I could point out to the poster that I use Windows 10, and I built a desktop PC. It doesn't really meet any of their criteria (except #3 computing power), but... it works for me. So maybe they should change and be more like me!
I use a Mac Book from time to time and the keyboard alone is special... I don't think Mac is a good universal machine for development to be honest. The devices overall are nice, out of the question, but a Linux machine is ultimately more powerful.
As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion.
Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations.
My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running.
Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
Well, you might be able to make it work, but the OS simply leaves you less freedom compared to a Linux machine.
And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way.
I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here.
Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
I had to connect a work Macbook to Ethernet. It didn't have a port so I bought a no-name brand USB-to-RJ45 adapter off Amazon. Come to find macOS doesn't have driver support for the adapter even though Windows and Linux are both plug and play. And I wasn't willing to do some backdoor process to install drivers on a work laptop. I had to buy a Apple branded adapter, which was 2x the price and only USB 2 vs the other one being USB 3.
I have a random off-amazon 2.5gbps usb ethernet adapter on my M1 and it works great. I did specifically make sure someone said it worked on a mac, but wasn't sure about on ARM.
I too have an M1 MBP and XPS 13. I pretty much always use the XPS. Side by side, there is no noticeable difference in speed for my everyday work. The MBP is more efficient for sure, but I get 8+ hours of battery from the XPS which is good enough - and I can run Linux without jumping through hoops.
Edit: Missed the 'z', sorry, possibly explains different experiences.
I had to jump through a few hoops to get Linux working right on my XPS 15, and it was actually a major reason I switched to a MacBook. The backlight didn't work with the original kernel released with Debian Bullseye. That got fixed with the next release of Bullseye, but I still only got something like, 4 hours of battery life? I'm almost certain it wasn't properly switching between integrated graphics and the Nvidia GPU, but there are only so many hours in the day to set this stuff up.
I really liked my XPS when I got it, but I'm pretty jaded about Linux support for laptops ever being good enough to compete with something like Apple. And at the end of the day I care a lot more about having a high quality Unix based OS than whether or not that OS is libre (sorry to say).
Same boat as you, waiting for the second generation, I don't event want to jump to the apple ecosystem but the battery life + performance at that price range makes it a almost a non-brainer for me
I got the 14" Max when they first came out and it's an absolutely fantastic laptop. I love it. The Max battery life is quite a bit worse than the regular M1, if thats your main concern go with the non-Max.
Mine is the ultrabook, the XPS 13z 2n1. It throttles nonstop, I've even gone so far to rip it open and attempted to re-paste everything inside of it. Unfortunately the ultrabook CPU can't be de-lidded and pasted without breaking things, I was actually the first person on /r/dell to rip this laptop open..
The XPS 13 is a much larger device (better cooling). The 13z ruined me ever buying another Dell. I really wanted to love that laptop and NOT buy a $3k macbook. I really want the 2n1 feature.
My wife has one of those things for work. She had to downclock the CPU in order to prevent it from running the fans at full speed for her workflows. After that, it was OK, slow, but at least no longer too loud to have a conversation next to it.
Different strokes for different folks. My Macbook collects dust whenever I'm home because I'd vastly prefer to do my work on a desktop Linux box. I don't have to spend my time updating coreutils, fighting Homebrew, fixing my screen sharing permissions for the 6th time this month, or really much of anything. My desktop and the systems we deploy to have almost complete parity.
I believe that's fixed upstream. Afaik, those issues stem from some strange FileVault/APFS inconsistencies, and have patches coming to fix it (in it's current incarnation). I don't dev on Macs unless I have to though, so I really couldn't say for sure.
I have a 2020 Mac with the highest fucking configuration (32GB RAM and i7 8-core 10th gen) and the fans on it are always going off.
I figure a laptop with a discrete GPU can handle external screens and graphics much better than integrated, but was wondering what your take on the M1 mac for this would be.
I use a 49" Samsung monitor that does 4k and like you mentioned my Intel work macbook pro is constantly spinning fans/hot. The M1 I honestly haven't noticed it making any noise while plugged into it. It also runs a lot better, less graphic glitches and weirdness. I don't like having to use my work mbp at all anymore.
I had an M1 MBA and it ran my 4k monitor fine. I would use it and the laptop screen at the same time. Great machine. I ended up giving it to my wife and getting an M1 MBP because I needed more than 16gb RAM for my workflows.
I think you misunderstood "more powerful". I don't think they were referring to the hardware being more powerful, but the OS in terms of its flexibility.
It's being sent to my mom this week, if you make that $1k I'll do it. It's barely 2 years old and has been awful since I got it. I think I just had higher expectations out of its form factor which can't keep itself cool at all.
Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful.
I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive.
And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
Agreed. I can't stand the feel of the MBP (16" 2019) keyboard. For one thing, it's too far to the right. But I also agree with you on the weird flat keys and soft F keys. At least mine has a real esc key. And this is purely habit & preference, but the control/option/command nonsense is infuriating. Everybody else does this the right way, get with the program Apple.
> I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place.
I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
Am I the only one who thinks the touchbar isn't that bad? I have a MBP that has the touchbar and a real escape key. I'm a little sad they ditched the touchbar, I wish they had kept it but put it above the row of function keys. There are some things for which it's handy.
I can't stand the touchbar. Aside from having to look down to know what I'm pressing and Monterey introducing bugs causing it to disappear forcing me to restart my computer, when it does work an entire row of keys shouldn't be able to "go to sleep". My media controls disappearing because I haven't touched my computer in 60 seconds or however long it takes is ridiculous. There's no way to disable it without hacking together a script[1]. It's one of the most frustrating designs of any product I've ever used.
edit - I just timed the sleep functionality. After 60 seconds it dims, and then 15 seconds later it goes to sleep completely....such a horrible implementation
Having the touchbar and the function keys would have been nice (e.g. if they had kept the function keys half-height, possibly with the exception of the escape and touchid keys).
However since apple decided that only "either" was an option, I'm much happier with having the function keys back.
The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.
I had a pre-2015 macbook for a while and I can honestly say that I've never had a worse keyboard. It hurt my fingers and it felt like Apple was trying to destroy my hands. A cheap $10 keyboard felt better.
This will come with a lot of problems and requires extra work. Apple Hardware is not intended by the manufacturer to be used as general purpose computer but to run MacOS.
I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows.
With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
Not my words but yes. Giving a corporation money encourages them to keep going that direction further. I would spend more money on Linux certified computers from (e.g. Lenovo, Dell, Purism, System76, Tuxedo...) which hopefully encourages this companies to keep going and improving. A single customer of course doesn't change much but 10.000 do.
Right, but the parent poster is presumably going to spend most of his time under linux, at which point a native linux box seems like the reasonable choice.
The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd like, but has also never crashed or glitched on me in a decade of use, so...), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Preview (I love Preview), the excellent and remarkably low-latency Terminal, Mail, et c.
Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
I get and respect that this is true for some people, but goodness, I am exactly the opposite. I find all of their builtin software to be irritating and unobvious.
It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades?
Mail is great too unlike Windows' very poor default one.
Windows now looks 10 years behind with no ability to catch up to the ARM standard and Linux, well, never.
> It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Yeah, it's far from perfect but it's really light on battery and is ~never the cause of beachballs while I'm using some other program, neither of which were the case with FF or Chrome, for me :-/ My ideal browser doesn't exist, but Safari definitely feels closer to it than FF or Chrome do. They get all the add-on stuff right, while Safari gets the fundamentals right.
> Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Bizarre. I'm a dock-hider (carried over from being a start-menu-hider on Windows for years and years) and hadn't noticed that. If I open a terminal window and drag the bottom down, sure enough, there's a little bit at the bottom I can't get it to go past. Oddly, if I use Spectacle to "maximize" it or send it to the left or right half of the screen, it manages to go a little lower (still not quite all the way!), but then the top has a tiny gap, like it's splitting the bottom gap between the top and bottom. Thanks, now that will bug me forever :-) I wonder if it's got something to do with line height?
> Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Yeah, it's no Office replacement if you need Office. I'm fortunate that it's just for my own use or for generating PDFs. They're like Abiword and Gnumeric on Linux (which were what I preferred over the bloated mess of OpenOffice on that platform) in that they're relatively lightweight but still fairly capable—except they don't crash as much and just, you know, work better.
> Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades?
It's straight up stupid that Preview can be an actual selling point for macOS in the year 2022, and yet, I can't point to a single similar program (or even just a PDF reader) on another desktop OS that's even close to it, and I've used tons of them over the years.
> Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
Same.
It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem.
Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on.
BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life, I would say it's adequate (except when stuff only works on Chrome, but not really safaris fault as far as I know). I dropped terminal instantly for kitty. Preview is the PDF viewer right? Will definitely say that thing is amazing.
First thing I did when I got my M1 though is partition the drive and dual boot asahi though.
> Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life
I wish it had more and better extensions, but the battery life savings and general lighter feel/effect on overall system responsiveness is so large that I put up with that unless I really have to have better dev tools or something. All my normal browsing happens in Safari. Took me like 3 years to convert after starting to use Macs, as I initially dismissed it, but damn, it's way lighter than FF or Chrome.
> Preview is the PDF viewer right?
It's a lots-of-things viewer, but its PDF support is so good that it made me go from hating when something was in a PDF, which had been the state of things with every PDF viewer I'd ever used since first encountering the format some time in the 90s, to liking PDFs. It's lightweight (like most of Apple's tools, I can just leave it in the background and forget it's there), crashes are extremely rare (maybe one or two in a decade or more of use?), and it supports all kinds of nice-to-have stuff like compiling a PDF from pages of other PDFs, removing or re-ordering pages, signing, light image editing and markup capabilities, et c.
Just started notes a couples weeks ago. Fantastic - disappointed I missed this for so long. Agree preview is great for what it is. Probably should go back to safari instead of chrome.
Notes is great. One time I was like "it'd be nice to put a PDF in this note. LOL, bet that won't work" but no, of course it did, embedded it exactly like I'd hoped it would. Drag & drop, there it is, can view it inline.
The two things that bug me: no markdown support, and no built-in export (but the format's simple and well known and there are existing 3rd party tools that can do it). Everything else is so good and so stable that I've been hesitant to go looking for something else to try to fill in those two features. I can live with a formatting bar and export being a little annoying if everything else is basically perfect.
YMMV. Linux on the 2019 16" MBP has a lot of issues that make it irritating. It works, but not perfectly by any stretch. And yes the machine is nice, except for the keyboard, which is probably one of the most important parts!
Maybe, maybe not. I'm a Linux person. I run Debian in a UTM VM on my MacBook Pro and do all the work in that.
Why? Because the host machine sucks less at all the desktop stuff that Linux is horrible at and the VM wins at all the server and dev stuff the Mac sucks at.
Developers usually desire a fast platform. While it is true most OS hosts can virtualize Linux, there are at least three important caveats when considering macOS. The first is that the file system performance is poor and chews up CPU when using file sharing [1]. The second is that if you are targeting x86_64 containers, you'll want to avoid full-virtualization and/or the Rosetta x86 to ARM translation later. Finally, the third is that if you work in machine learning, chances are you use NVIDA on the server, so you may want to do simple smoke testing of your containers locally, but Apple no longer ships computers with NVIDIA graphics cards.
Now some of that is alleviated if you are building non-machine learning ARM images, but you may run the risk of not having ARM versions of third-party containers you need.
I personally regret not thinking ahead about this and buying a MacBook Pro a few years ago. Either with Linux directly, or with Windows WSL2, I don't think developers need to buy a macOS machine unless they need to build iOS or macOS apps. And even then, you can rent time on GitHub-hosted Actions macOS runners instead.
Not anymore. Not on the M1s. They're far and away faster than anything but the beefiest desktop. A lua parser benchmark I ran in a VM on my M1 beat my 5950X by a factor of two.
The only remaining limitation are missing some ARM docker containers (which is slowly being solved) and the machines not being suitable for ML (in which case you need a desktop or to rent server time on the cloud).
It is definitely not easier to passthrough an NVIDIA GPU that I require for machine learning to a virtual machine on an M1 Mac versus just buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU. I don't even know if M1 supports eGPU, have not heard anything about it, and I doubt PCI passthrough or whatever you use for eGPUs works on macOS. Sometimes hardware does matter, and it glaringly matters (esp. w.r.t. CUDA).
Also consider gaming. Considering that GPU virtualization is not really a thing still, I cannot imagine, for example, gaming being easier on macOS, and the VM requires additional setup too.
Only real limitations are lack of ML because no server/desktop-grade GPU and some missing ARM-based docker containers. But the latter is slowly being resolved and the former isn't gonna happen on a laptop anyways.
Before, there were a multitude of reasons not to develop in a VM: Poor support for accelerated instructions on laptops; Slow CPUs; limited RAM; slow file-sharing between the host and guest.
The M1 architecture solves most of the issues.
Modern laptops almost universally support accelerated instructions now. This means less overhead, so doing everything entirely in the VM is worth it now. So no more dealing with slow file-sharing.
The speed of the M1 also means you're not limited compared to your desktop. Depending on the benchmark (especially any benchmark relying on CPU cache size), it may be faster on the M1 air than on a 5950X. Even in workloads where the laptop is slower, it is now fast enough.
Running docker containers in a VM on a 16GB *non-M1* machine is untenable. The M1's RAM is not only higher bandwidth and lower latency, but the compression and caching has improved so much that you can fit much more in that same 16GB.
In use-cases where you need more than 16GB, the M1's NVMe disk is so low latency that swap usage is indistinguishable in performance from RAM usage. So the laptop has no memory limit, for practical purposes (though the wear on the disk is increased in this case).
In addition, ARM architectures were a pain to deal with before, so most people emulated x86_64 and assume that you'd still have to do that on the M1. Nowadays, there is no reason not to run an ARM Linux in the VM. Most programs run just fine, and the remaining holdouts are a few Docker containers that haven't been updated. But even those aren't a problem because recent improvements to Docker greatly simplify running x86_64 containers under QEMU.
Combine all of this with the Mac app ecosystem (which has its problems, but is generally OK to use, especially if your other devices come from Apple), improved battery, the return of the good keyboard, and greatly lowered TDP, there really isn't a choice to make anymore.
The remaining reasons not to use it are basically as follows:
1) Compatibility with external devices, or work on embedded controllers
2) Anything requiring significant GPU compute (ML, etc.). But this would likely be done on a desktop rather than a laptop, which wasn't the scope of the question.
3) Disk capacity requirements (though external NVMe over thunderbolt mostly solves this)
4) Extremely multi-threaded work (video editing, etc.) where a desktop CPU outperforms the M1's multi-thread score.
I've read the entire thread and took note of all the top-level responses that talked about Macs before the parent was posted versus the ones not talking about Macs. There are what, 4-5 mentions about getting a Mac out of dozens of non-Mac recommendations? Barely anyone gave those Mac comments attention before they were downvoted to the end anyway.
Parent just seems to have an axe to grind and took the opportunity to hijack a thread about recommendations.
The one big thing thats always deterred me from Macs is the poor ecosystem for gaming. I dont play a lot of games anymore, but its a pretty reliable way of getting some much needed socialising in so I probably wouldn't want to lose it completely.
The problem is most workarounds I've seen are either to severly limit the games I can play or to get another computer/console for playing games, which just seems to be turning one problem into two. You can't even dualboot anymore, now that we have M1.
I use a console for gaming and a Mac for a daily driver. I never really got into PC gaming, though, I've always felt like the console experience was better. At least for the games I enjoy playing.
I'd love to get a console, it'd make things so much easier (pretty much any bog standard laptop would work for me otherwise), but none of my friends are on console
There are many angles to take when responding to a query, and when doing so one must consider, and occasionally, question the original premises.
In public forums, one should assume both the questions and the answers to be for a wider audience. People are here for the alternate takes, the discussions, etc. Built-in to the interface of this site and many like it are tools to hide threads, in part or in entirety, and to downvote posts or threads deemed inappropriate or irrelevant.
I guess my main counterpoint is that it's a bit vain to expect a diverse public forum to be one's own personal consultancy / counsel / etc.
If your work is even a bit I/O sensitive, avoid mounting OSX folders and use named volume mounts. They are much faster as they don't cross the virtualisation boundary but you need to be careful to not destroy them if they contain data you wanted to keep
For me personally, disable the new virtualization framework and gfuse options. I hope they're working better for others, but I'm not seeing any benefits yet and CPU usage dropped significantly after disabling these
The biggest problem seems to be the slow disk performance when working with volumes. At least in personal projects I could make this fast by making use of Docker's caching in creative ways. E.g. first copying the package deps, installing them and afterwards copying the (often changing) source. Also sometimes when a volume is needed it can be enough to make it a single file volume.
I just put linux on the MBP in the end. Much better docker experience. I can't believe companies elect to pay for Docker Desktop only to have it be so crappy.
Can everyone that has spent at least one month using Linux on an M1 as a daily driver please respond with their experiences, so we know that this "Linux on an M1" recommendation is valid?
It doesn't run linux anywhere near as well as a X1 Carbon. I get daily crashes on a fresh install on a M1 Mac after only a couple weeks of having it. My X1 Carbon has been running strong for nearly a year with no memorable crashes during that time period.
There's software I can't even install because there aren't arm versions of it available.
Eh, it's a public forum, I made a comment about Macs because I was curious why they were ruled out and a lot of conversation took place below my comment. We are not limited to talking about what OP wants us to talk about.
Nitpick: he said he didn't want to use MacOS, which doesn't necessarily rule out a MacBook. I hate MacOS but my personal laptop is a 2015 MacBook Pro running MX Linux, and I love it.
It's natural for people to be perplexed when OP asks for the best option, is given the best option, and produces an irrational excuse against that option.
What are people supposed to say besides, let's help you resolve that excuse?
I don't think they said they've had problems with Macs. They simply said their intention is not to use Windows or Mac OS. To me, that still leaves room to recommend a Mac.
These posts are annoying, IMO. Reviews and blogs posts about them are everywhere by like minded readers, and this is the discourse such posts bubble up every time here.
Guys. I mean. Seriously. It’s a laptop. It’s not worth a request for comments every week.
None of the threads seemed to have a consensus e.g. some swear by the Dell XPS 13, others say the laptop has been a crap experience more or less. Others still prefer Lenovo Thinkpad variants, and even these have those who've had negative experiences. I was hoping for a winner of some sort or at least a list of recommended laptops that I can bookmark and spend time reading reviews of. Hope that makes sense and sorry for the inconvenience caused.
Reviews are hard. Nobody agrees on anything, and some people have very strong options about certain things (trackpads, keyboards g that little mouse nub between the g an h keys)..
I have a system76 oryx pro running pop os. It’s older now (8th gen intel). Works well, though I had a fan start grinding, it was an easy replacement. The machine is a clevo so replacement parts are easy to get. I like it. My previous home machine was a 2014 Mac book. Oryx is bigger, faster, heavier. The build quality isn’t as good as the Mac but it decent. It has nvidia graphics which even run games. Battery life isn’t great, especially when running the nvidia card (you can switch to intel graphics ). It upgrades the os easily unless like me you do so manual stuff.. system 76 support is good (part of what you pay a premium for)
I just got work to buy a new system 76 machine for me. The amd laptop model “pangolin”. I like it so far.
That probably answers your question ;-). Along with the fact that you found multiple previous discussions. There is no consensus to be had, everyone will have their own particular definition of 'good' and the variance is so wide that you'll just have to figure it out for yourself.
I'm happy for your post (I might be about to look into deciding for a laptop, too, and unlike general review sites the discussion here is centred on the use for a particular community we're part of), and honestly I find JabavuAdams' post pretty toxic (it does elicit more heated arguments). The annoying thing here in my view is this sub-thread, not your post.
Look I’ve designed electronics for big corp; if you used the internet 99-2004, parts I designed probably switched your packets, or boosted signal.
You’re trying to predict your future. No one here can help with that.
You know your philosophical constraints. Hardware across vendors fails at largely the same rate due to normalized manufacture and sourcing patterns now. It all comes from the same few parts bins pretty much. The key specs are listed on each site.
Reality is you have roughly the same risk of getting a lemon or finding a laundry list of nitpicks with any choice.
If you want a laptop for development - get MacBook. I used to be a die-hard Windows guy about 10 years ago. After that switched to Linux on my Desktop and used it for a year. When I switched job they gave me MBP 2011 model, I hated it. The OS, but not the laptop. The new 2015 MBP were complete garbage, but I got used to macOS. The M1 laptops are the only laptops I would suggest to anybody. The battery life is so amazing, no overheating issues, I love it.
My work also depends on Linux, I have my own company, that provides tools for monitoring Kubernetes, OpenShift and Docker. Only OpenShift is sketchy on arm64, everything else works great. https://github.com/lima-vm/lima is a great tool to run Linux VM. Also Docker for Mac and Rancher Desktop both work perfectly!
But switching to Mac could be a challenge. I was always big fun of Thinkpad laptops, especially X1 Carbon. My wife uses it (she is Windows geek). But obviously this laptop is a laptop, not a computing machine. If you need computing power, just go to Costco and get yourself a gaming laptop with good video card (3060 would be in your price range). Read this https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLaptops/comments/srxtrx/gamin... to see which laptop provides enough power to the graphics card. But of course those gaming laptops are more like desktops you can easily move. The power bricks are huge, and laptops are heavy.
Another option to consider is to get a Desktop, you can buy used Workstations/Servers from companies like https://tekboost.com/ I got from them 2 x Nvidia Quadro M4000 8GB, Dual Xeon E5-2680V4 2.4GHz 14C, 256GB RAM for about 4k. For 2k I am sure you can find something that can fit your budget.
I mean, it's already kind of stupid to want to avoid something the whole industry uses, from big tech to startups. In particular, when you have a very hard set of requirements that historically no one gets right except for you know who.
> I mean, it's already kind of stupid to want to avoid something the whole industry uses, from big tech to startups
Windows still owns the market to a substantial degree, Macos is still a niche OS. Maybe you've seen a trend of software companies moving to Macos, but it's definitely not the standard by any means.
Mac is probably a good dev machine. But for production and service…? I don't think so. It is currently the most unstable system I ever met. I need to reboot it due to completely un-addressable memory leak and lag (the cpu is idle, the memory isn't starved, disk don't really have much io and it still lags) from time to time if I keep it on for a long time.
Have you ever been to an office outside of the FAANG / Silicon Valley Startup Bubble?
You won't see a Mac almost anywhere.
The numbers don't lie. Windows is more widely used than MacOS right now, period. And it's not even close.
Maybe that is starting to change, maybe we're in for another round of companies going "This is what they do at Google" and playing follow the leader. Maybe. But that's not the conversation we're having.
If you want to have that conversation, make those points. Not this "but it's what FAANG uses" appeal to authority nonsense.
The reasonable answer at the end of the day remains
> Cool, use what works for you.
There are use cases where Macs are useless or such a PITA to work with (ugh native compilation), others where they're kinda necessary (i.e. iOS development), and there's been no info about this from OP, so the most reasonable thing to do is still to acknowledge they have a good reason, and stop forcing Macs into the suggestions, even more so by using baseless arguments.
Apple is a luxury fashion company and Apple hardware is a way for people to express social status, which means convincing as many other people as possible that Apple is desirable in order to elevate the effectiveness of their social status signaling. It's the same as any other luxury fashion brand, e.g. Louis Vuitton. The value is not in the function of the product itself, but in the perception of status that it engenders.
I felt the way you do for the entire decade of the '00s.
Then I started a job that issued me a MacBook Pro. And got to see, use, and develop for, a shitload of Android and iOS devices, both phones and tablets.
Turns out I'd just never given them a chance.
But yes, I'm sure Apple users are just dumber than you, and that's all it is.
> But yes, I'm sure Apple users are just dumber than you, and that's all it is.
I too fell for the Apple marketing cult. I was excited when I got my first MacBook. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. The keyboard felt terrible and broke frequently, the insistence of dongles to make up for the anemic port selection was a constant annoyance, the touchbar was a myopic UX catastrophe, the touchpad was worse than on PC laptops that I've used, the software was outdated, configurability and lack of control was appalling, and it was abundant with boneheaded design decisions that favored form over function. At least the screen was nice. Today it sits gathering dust in the corner.
But yes, I'm sure non-Apple users are just too dumb to appreciate Jobbesian bliss, and that's all it is.
Heh, I was kinda bummed out when I got mine. I'd been developing on Linux for years. That turned around hard in a month or two.
This was well before the super-shitty run they had where they went all-USB-C, Touch Bar (ugh), and ruined their keyboards, though. I'd probably have been a lot less impressed if that was my introduction to their stuff.
The thread is in the context of Apple users insisting that the OP should use a Mac, when the OP has explicitly stated that it does not fit their needs.
Well, sure, because Apple makes it impossible to develop for iOS devices without using a Mac. So you HAVE to fully buy into their ecosystem if you want to develop anything for their mobile phones.
Could we get tech companies to step up and beat the fashion company then? Because on many, many, many comparisons the fashion company makes them look completely inept at making tech products. I know, they've only had 20 years, it seems like a ridiculous ask.
Besides raw specs of CPUs and GPUs, which the fashion company is encroaching on too, my non-fashion product's trackpads, screen color quality, sound quality, screen hinges, heat dissipation locations, power efficiency, keyboards, case flex, case materials, weight, size, storage speeds, and upgradability are just some of the things that all suck on my Lenovo, Microsoft and Asus laptops my household owns and that my fashion laptops consistently do better.
My non-fashion products manage to put better refresh rate screens in, and I can get gaming capable discrete GPUs, and one of them lets me upgrade the RAM aftermarket, but for the most part they're all worse products that have lower utility than the fashion products. The perception they engender with me is that they're the only company that builds a product they don't secretly loathe.
There are many ways to signal social status, and we'd all be better off if people favored ones with positive externalities (e.g. volunteering and donating to charity) rather than ones with negative externalities (e.g. lining the pockets of executives of the world's richest company while they endeavor to reduce computers to unrepairable appliances and destroy general-purpose computing).
I love and develop for Linux, but I use a Mac. I understand people’s complaints about macs, but in no way have I bought it for any kind of signaling. Most people don’t know I use a Mac, except my family.
I used to be a windows person, and had the same opinion about macs as you, but now I exclusively buy macs for myself and my family bc I am the family’s IT support team. And guess what? The amount of time and headaches it saved me over the years can’t be understated. It would not have been possible with Linux.
My mother can drag and drop an app into applications folder but even that is a stretch. She however can easily open the App Store and click buy, using the same UX as on her phone. Guess how many things are intuitive to her across her ipad, iPhone and Mac, that she almost never has to call me for anything.
I have my family on a family sharing plan with my card on it (I have terrible things to tell Apple about the fact that I have no granular control abt who or how much people can spend there) , but the fact that they are able to get what they need to be productive without having to research the many different ways an application is installed, or how it’s impossible to uninstall or to handle all those MSIs or whatever the windows installers do now, or virus scanning everything under the sun (and let me not forget about the mcaffee and avg and avast licenses and adware from companies that are supposed to be legitimate and give you peace of mind)…is priceless (I know, sounds like an Apple ad, but it’s true).
More, the integration with the outside world, how people can record voice, take notes, photos and have these things readily available everywhere. The finder app, and how I don’t need 100 different apps to view things I download from the web or get from an external source. Again, priceless.
You can geolocate, disable, brick your stolen hardware, no extra software, apps or cost. Super useful, I forgot my laptop in a cab once at an airport, my mother had hers stolen. Both are confirmed bricked. Maybe other brands/OSes have this now, but I have no time to find out.
Back to my family, how they can subscribe to things like scribd, audio books, udemy, and a bunch of other things without having to go through all the marketing pages and double speak of these services online and be able to cancel immediately if they need, gives them a lot of power and I’m glad they can get what they need when they need and move on with their lives. My mother is a lawyer, she should not spend her time fighting an OS.
Linux would be better than windows, but it has failure modes that require admin level terminal skills to solve. I use Linux server, but I have no need for the desktop atm.
Finally, maybe today is different or I never looked hard enough, but it used to be that to get a Linux laptop, I’d need to get a windows laptop and dual boot or wipe it and install Linux.
I may have time for this with servers (that’s my work), and I may have had time for this when I was in college, but I most certainly do not have time for this now.
Maybe if it were as easy to just walk into a store or get online and buy a Linux laptop back then, I might have gone Linux desktop rather than Mac.
In my mind, windows is hell, Linux is expert level, Mac is for everyone.
This is not an answer for this post, I would also like to get the answer and maybe I’ll try that.
Linux user base is far more cultish. For one, they collaborate for free over high minded concepts and lol at outsiders who don’t know their incantations.
Cults were never paying their people, and like to demean outsiders. So there’s that.
But we're serious. OP has created their own nonsensical boundaries with these constraints. Essentially the title is completely misleading apart from the 2K number. If OP is looking specifically for a linux-compatible machine they should have at least mentioned that in the title. It's no suprise at all that these types of answers are in this thread.
I saw the title, came here to offer my thoughts about mac options, when I realize that actually "not allowed" by OP's request. It's click baity and almost feels like it was designed to get a rise out of the HN crowd.
There's a meaningful title, and a set of perfectly common and reasonable requirements in an ordered, clear, explicit fashion that we all normally wish requester would follow.
But because some jumped in with their own agenda, and feel stifled... now these are "nonsensical boundaries" :->
(Plus, I mean, if somebody wanted a mac... how much advice or options do they need ? Want a mac, get a mac. That part of equation is not exactly complicated, for better or for worse, is it? So let's not pretend this was anything but zealots wanting to chime in :)
Really? OP should have put every requirement in the title? You couldn't have just read the requirements then moved on? And because you didn't then OP deserves these nonsense responses?
"I've had these problems with Mac"
Reasonable response: Cool, use what works for you. EDIT> Here are some suggestions that match your constraints.
Annoying response 1: You should reconsider because Mac works great for me.
Annoying response 2: Your problems aren't real problems.
Annoying response 3: Let's live debug your problems in this thread to see if they're real problems.
Guys. I mean. Seriously.