Wait, do they?
I mostly remember:
- A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
- Aimless products like the Vision Pro that seems to have failed as the "get the devs excited" premium SDK launch everyone described it as
- Rocky start issues on Apple Intelligence, nerfed Siri, etc.
- Unexciting iPhone launch and lots of ridicule levied on Liquid Glass
It's the laptop to get for compute/battery, which definitely is not nothing, but I'd say few tech people have been excited about Apple otherwise lately, as product or platform.
Are you sure?
They also use it for their growing ad platform.
Can't let people find your app for free. You need to pay to defend your trademark and lead in a given app category.
Plus they've severed the customer relationship and inserted themselves as Mafia middlemen. They'll sell that to companies too.
Whether that'll lead to the government requiring Apple to break their encryption, it remains to be seen. I imagine Apple has a bit of an edge here anyway, since iCloud is allegedly e2e encrypted?
Im not really sure how that benefits me as a US citizen but that is who the majority of the population seems to want and once the rules are set you follow or face made up tariffs that rip you apart. Right.
I think we basically agree - just clarifying here.
And probably fewer still consider switching to the alternatives. Apple is, for better or worse, usually the least bad option.
Apple and Google both use immutable locked down OSes on their main products that prevents improving device security, such as IP & DNS filtering / blocking.
Microsoft user experience keeps getting worse. Latest version of Teams, as of today, says I'm at the "Calendar" screen and the navigation and content screen both show "Chat". "Calendar" was unpinned because I find Teams to be at interacting with content. No reason it should be a PDF viewer when the desktop application is actually usable allows for viewing chat and content at the same time.
I understand developing for those platforms makes money or is needed for other products. Unless I have to develop products that support those companies, I will never pay with my personal income to support those organizations.
Linux is better.
That worm has turned, at least five years ago
* Xcode 26 is kinda neat, though
Having owned plenty of Thinkpads (Linux), Dells(Windows and Linux) and plenty of Macbook Pros, I can say, Apple's superiority of hardware is so far beyond the rest. Having an OS with a BSD-ish experience is really nice as well. I've spent 27 years in engineering and during most of that time I get the random "Linux is far superior", "I like Windows better" folks... but by and large, yes, Apple's tech has a ton of good will.
If you asked me 2 years ago I would say something different about Linux than I would said today, because I’m running a different distribution with a different desktop environment and that changed my experience completely, even though I’m running on basically the same hardware.
I run Linux in Apple hardware too, how does that rank in your comparison?
Hardware: Apple announced an ARM based CPU and started shipping. It was _mostly_ a seemless experience thanks to Rosetta2. The performance on these well-built machines was outstanding. Even the Intel-based machines previously had really strong performance. The machines themselves (on average) were among some of the most well-built. Yes, there were outliers with the butterfly keyboards. Yes there were outliers with silly features like the touchbar. We're talking on average.
Software: Apple's OS is just a boring Unix that works. Yes I realize that Unix is in name only - but on top of that XNU microkernel really is a lot of BSD. Having the GNU tools available AND Sound/Fingerprint Reader/HiRes Display that actually scales... that is still not the reality in Linux. (I still love Linux btw - I keep multiple machines around the house running it) So not having to spend a great deal of time fiddling with config files when I plug in an external monitor actually is a big deal. Most folks don't want the hassles of messing with pavucontrol just because they switched to their external audio setup. Most folks will appreciate when they drag a window to that exterinal monitor that the HiDPI didn't cause text to go wonky.
So those are the areas where Apple is just massively superior. They nailed it in the "it just works" department. They've nailed it in the "quality hardware" department.
Windows also does fairly well in a lot of these areas.
As far as running Linux on Apple hardware? I had a buddy come into a meeting running Gnome+Ubuntu on his MacBook Pro back around 2017... as soon as he plugged into the projector, it was a mess. I'm sure it's gotten better since then.
It's funny that this exact phrase could have been written about Apple in 1998.
Mac OS 8 had no preemptive multitasking or meaningful address space protections. A single bad pointer dereference in user mode took down the entire system, and a single busy loop without a yield locked up the entire system.
Both of these were universally admitted to be bad and outdated by technically minded people.
By 1997 they had looked at replacing it with BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and purchased the latter with the goal of replacing Mac OS. The Rhapsody OS, an OS8 style UI with NeXT underneath, had already been started. Before that, they had also attempted and failed to write a next gen classic Mac OS (Copland).
Windows 9x had a lot of problems, but had preemptive multitasking and much better address space isolation. Windows NT 4 Workstation was also a thing at the time and much better. It did take them two more releases to make it into the consumer product.
And that's just in the Microsoft vs Apple camp. If you left that then Unix, BSD, BeOS, etc also blew it out of the water.
MacOS 8 looked pretty, but it was far from a "good" OS.
None of these were issues on Windows 98.
Are any applications on your Mac touching Rosetta right now? You'd better hope not because those single percentage gains from ARM evaporate fast.
Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
>it doesn't matter because the ARM transition is essentially already done
'Essentially' is doing a lot of heavy-lifting here, but, putting that aside, A. you're wrong, I've recently ran into Rosetta throttling and B. it's not a good reason to begin the project at all, it's only a good reason when it's already done. You're essentially ceding "Yes, I've been wrong and this has been a fool's errand for the past x years until right this moment as the project is done". It's not done and it'd a weak argument.
>Aside from superior performance and battery life (even compared to ARM windows offerings), the M series devices are generally reliable, unlike windows laptops running Intel and (less so) AMD.
Specifically what are the numbers? Because I have performance/tdp numbers and the M-series performs well but it isn't a categorical difference. In fact, that's no difference, it performs okay but AMD is at the top of the heap currently. Sad.
If the OS is old, things like FFMPEG will not work with things like Audacity. And to use an old version of FFMPEG, you have to guess which one, then install a variety of dev tools to compile it, waay beyond the capability of the average "I just want to record my podcast user". Audacity itself has an extensive help article devoted to this issue for Mac.
If you have a new Mac, you'll find companies have given up going through the cost and time of certifying for each new Mac OS, like Evoluent (early vertical mouse maker), who gave up several versions ago and won't support using all the extra mouse buttons their product has on Mac.
If you want to use many audio plugins, you'll have to deal with special permissions if it didn't come from the app store. If you want to use zoom to let a remote tech control your screen, you have to find and set two security permisssions.
For all four of these issue on Windows, it just works.
UPDATE: As commenter below pointed out, experienced users have a different experience than new users, which doesn't invalidate the specific issues I've mentioned, and which I encounter every month, and sometimes weekly.
The echo chamber is still reverberating. People say that MacOS is good because other people have told them so. The people claiming that is better don't have an earnest effort outside of the ecosystem to support their claims. I was forced to use MacOS at work up until a little over 1.5 years ago, I have perspective on both, and it is categorically incompetent. It doesn't hold a candle to dev on Linux.
As for Windows? Windows 7/11 are probably still better than MacOS (as you implied with your comment about neglect), but it's probably as bad or slightly better than Win 11.
They’re all perfectly viable options with strengths and weaknesses. None of them are especially great. I’m partial to MacOS, personally.
It’s willful ignorance to think that the many millions of people that like MacOS are just parroting what they’ve been told.
This is so entirely true.
I've installed so many different Linux distributions (and multiple Windows versions) on my personal laptop. Currently noodling around with NixOS.
I've never been tempted by a non-macOS laptop for work.
Whatever faults macOS has, it is very good at staying out of my way for getting work done, and all the small ancillary bits (eg webcam and audio support for chatting) have worked flawlessly for me for two decades. I cannot say the same about either Windows or Linux.
IMO, "consumer electronics enthusiasts" != "tech people"
Maybe you're speaking for yourself? I absolutely love my Macbook and the M-series are the best devices I've ever owned.
> - A neglected desktop OS with slowly deteriorating quality
Really? I haven't noticed.
"Mostly" is not good enough. The user experience of Apple is still good, the developer experience is woeful
