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.

AKA, it's human nature.

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.

The post wasn't about how you engage with the device. It was simply another similar scenario where the same behaviour emerges.

It's an emotional decision dressed in layers of thought and reason.

While is this true, the number of console wars spawned from comparing physical controller feel might bring the parallel back on track.

It's also a form of entertainment.

> unemotional rationality is uncommon

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.

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.

Definitely not.

> Linux on desktop doesn't have commercial interest to begin with

Red Hat is literally IBM now...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

I've never seen a developer with a macbook in my country. The idea sounds absurd.

Unless you need Final Cut or whatever, Apple is considered a status brand in many parts of the world.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our devs are picking Macbooks because it's the lesser pain in the butt, many would go with Linux if allowed.

In places where they are largely affordable for a developer, absurdity becomes relative to what you value in a development system.

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.

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.

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.

What country is that?

Here is a detailed blog on it: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/cult-of-mac/

That is a good question. But ...

> 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?

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

I can compile for EVERY PLATFORM from my Arch Linux, just not for Apple stuff.

It's ridículous... This kind of behavior reminds me of Ballmer's Microshit.

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.

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.

That's not to say all Apple products are bad.

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.

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.

Different strokes for different folks.

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.

If you want 16gb memory you're paying at least 1700gbp.

If you want 32gb, it's 2999gbp.

Most Windows laptops have upgradable memory and you can buy yourself 32gb ram for ~100gbp.

A Macbook Air with 16GB memory and 256GB SSD is £1,199 including 20% VAT in the UK.

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.

Ever think it’s simply because they are amazing machines instead of being some conspiracy or mass brainwashing?

They are OK. Not jaw droppingly good, just okay-ish. I work as a mobile app dev and unfortunately you can't avoid Mac for iOS dev :p

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.

The 2017-18 macbook pros (touchbar) were complete rubbish. Everything was rubbish. Keyboards. Heat. Battery. Processors.

The M1s are gods gift to developers. By far the best laptop I've used, and I don't see how anyone else can catch up

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Thinkpad with Windows 11 and WSL2 is mindblowing

- 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".

- 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.

- At least you can use your favorite WM on Linux?

> 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)

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.

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.

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"

I read the same post and I only focussed on the story and flippant mention on gender never crossed my mind until you brought it up..

So they need external validation for their choice, which they get by seeing everyone else switching to the Mac ecosystem as well.

It’s not that apple users are fanatics, it’s that some people define their identity by their OS and will make absolutely certain you know.

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.

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.