I haven't had too much trouble with it aside from a poorly responsive spacebar at one point. I still dislike it though, and don't really find any value in the extra thinness.
I like the sharpness of it and don't mind short travel.
I hate when I have to send my laptop in to Apple for 10 days to repair it because a speck of dust entered it.
So now I use a "keyboard condom" on it to keep dust out (despite Apple's explicit support article saying NOT to use one) and it's turned into the worst keyboard since the ZX80
Oh how sad. I remember those videos showing the first unibody MBPs, everyone was drooling over those. Now people have to use that!! [1] while $200 laptops from ASUS have keyboards that work for 10 years.
I wish they were the kind of company that could admit a mistake, but it breaks their story.
Not sure what you're talking about. Nobody has to use them.
I like to use them so my laptop keyboard stays clean and helps soften the noise since MacBook Pro is designed to at least partially emulate a mechanical keyboard.
But it’s so so so infuriatingly shoddy. Cmd fell out on my previous laptop. On my current one most of the keys feel wobbly. Coupled with accidental brushes againt touchbar and the unnecessarily enlarged touchpad frequently failing at palm rejection this ends up being a very subpar experience compared to earlier models.
I love it. I recently had to temporarily go back to a 2014 MacBook and it just felt mushy and imprecise. The new keyboards feel sharp and way more precise. Just simply better.
I love them. The newer keyboards have a very satisfying clickiness to them. I guess I'm lucky to have a 2018 model that's not had keystroke issues however
If you’re going to suggest vim bindings, fine, I get it; but the act of moving a cursor around to insert, remove, replace, or otherwise refactor parts of code is pretty essential to my workflow and I can’t imagine how someone wouldn’t need it. I use structural editing shortcuts quite a bit, but not 100% of the time.
Been using them for several years now and I like them a lot too. I have the v2 MacBook where the 'b' key got stuck once but I managed to fix with some can of air spray. Have had various MBPs at work and most of been fine too.
I've always had a habit ofregularly clean my keyboards too which I think may have helped reduce the amount of dirt getting stuck underneath.
My company bought me a 2018 MacBook Pro about two weeks ago and so far I'm enjoying the keyboard; I like the tactile feel (I typically use mechanical keyboards whenever I'm at a desk, and so the tactile feel of the MacBook Pro's keyboard was a pleasant surprise), and there's more travel than I thought there would be. I remember trying the butterfly keyboards back in 2016 and hating them, so either something must have changed or my preferences have changed.
With that being said, I've only had this MacBook Pro for two weeks, and so we'll see if it remains reliable over the next few years.
I think you’ll find a lot of people that like the way the keys feel and travel — like me — but are really tired of not having a reliable machine.
I’ve had to take multiple different machines in for repair. And each time I have to tell them to replace the entire keyboard, but they always want to blow it with an air can. Utterly infuriating.
No, I also like it. I’m not saying the complaints are unfounded, but they’re not my issues. I broke the command key after about a year of heavy use, but it took about five minutes at an Apple Store to have it replaced. I’ve broken keys on every laptop I’ve ever had, including the venerated IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads. (Don’t even get me started on how many problems I had with that horrendous trackpoint thing.)
Since then, my only complaint about the MBP is the arrow key arrangement, which I will never adapt to, and the goddamn useless, laggy yet hypersensitive touchbar.
When I have to use other people’s keyboards, I dislike their long travel now.
I liked it when it worked. It's all about what you are used to I think. When typing on a mechanical keyboard for a while, even a thinkpad keyboard will seem like pressing on cardboard. But mine broke a lot and I managed to snap off the key caps, those are really fragile.
“seven elements that every keyboard needs to create a great typing experience.” I have a hard time imagining what those seven elements are, because I get stuck at two: 1. Produces the characters 2. That I intended to type. These two attributes are also, incidentally, what the biggest and most-valuable tech companies in the world are somehow grappling with anew.
Oh come on. Having a keyboard that causes as little fatigue and soreness as possible over time is an unsolved and complicated problem. There's also noise to consider. And laptops don't have infinite room. These factors come after "does it make the characters?" but they are not unimportant.
She was being sarcastic. She wasn't saying that nothing else matters, she was saying that nothing else matters if it fails at being a functional keyboard.
> “So, just curious, why did you buy another one?” she asked, referring to the 2018 MacBook Air I’d gotten six months after selling the Pro.
I was hoping she talked more about this part, but brushing it aside by bringing up "Apple ecosystem" is pretty unsatisfactory. It does tell you, though, that Apple has its target demographic by the balls, and broken keyboards are certainly not chasing them away.
Macbooks will get fixed the day tech journalists start writing articles about how they tried a Windows laptop and liked it.
My laptop of choice (X1 Carbon) consistently gets a pretty good rep for its keyboard. I'm still using my ~6.5 year old first generation (top spec) and the keyboard remains flawless.
But then again they actually test for foreign particle ingression:
Practically any laptop has a good keyboard compared to the first two generations of butterfly keyboards. I have suffered through a MacBook Pro with the second generation butterfly mechanism. Although I liked the feel of the pristine keyboard, pretty soon specks of dusts made keys get stuck/repeat regularly. I also had a can of compressed air to blow out the dust regularly.
Between the broken keyboard and only 2 USB-C port, I hated that laptop. I know have a MacBook Pro with a 3rd generation butterfly keyboard (which has the dust seals) and 4 USB-C ports. I am finally starting to like MacBooks again. So far the keyboard has been fine. Touch ID on a MacBook is absolutely brilliant, flying through 1Password and sudo prompts is awesome. The new True Tone screen is awesome. The largest downside: MacBooks have become even more expensive than they already were.
Why did I stay on a Mac? Three reasons: 1) I use a lot of Mac-specific apps (OmniGraffle, Deckset, Things) that I absolutely love. 2) macOS is still a great operating system. 3) The hardware is still simply better. The last point two points notice now that I work remotely and I Skype with my colleagues nearly daily. When I Skype with someone with a MacBook or iMac, the sound quality is great and without a lot of distortion. When I Skype with someone that uses a ThinkPad or another PC laptop, the sound quality is typically bad, their mics pick up a lot of noise, and somehow noise cancellation seems to work quite badly. Then there are OS-specific problems (which may also be Skype bugs), e.g. if someone shares their screen with me, I see the mouse pointer when they are on a Mac, but if they are on Linux there is no mouse pointer.
We'll see whether the rubber seals keep out the dust permanently or just delays the speck of death. If the dust gets in it'll be a whole lot harder to remove with compressed air.
About the sound thing - I recently discovered that this is because the Macbook has several microphones which allows for ambient noise reduction. Something I wish was easier to set up for personal use - I use a webcam to stream tabletop roleplaying games, and ambient noise is a big problem.
I do IT orders in a research institute, a MBP user wants a big memory machine to do server side data analysis, and wants to order the iMac pro 128 GB ram. He’s shocked to learn that for the same price he can get a Dell Epyc server with 512 GB ram. Guess what he still wants? The iMac, for the “ecosystem”.
I think that people underestimate the cost for most people to switch to another system.
If you use any system for years, there are many ingrained habits that are hard to unlearn. Then there are probably applications that they use that have no direct replacements on Windows or Linux (e.g. OmniGraffle). Sure, there may be applications within the same class (diagramming), but even if they are as polished, it takes time to become as productive in a replacement.
Most people who are not tech enthusiasts just want things to stay as they know them. For a normal user, switching to another OS and applications is like switching from QWERTY to Dvorak - a long, tedious process, that will reduce productivity for one or two years.
Somewhat ironically, using a unix-variant is the easiest way to stick to what you know. Windows and to some extend macOS has gone through some design fads. Apple ditches/replaces fully functional programs, such as Quicktime 7, Aperture, and iWork (it took many years to get linked text boxes back). Whereas on a unix, you can still work like it is 1979 if you want to.
>> I think that people underestimate the cost for most people to switch to another system.
I've been using all three major OS-es extensively for years, so for me switching wouldn't actually be that much of a problem. The simple fact of the matter is that I prefer macOS for almost anything, by far. No lock-in required.
Like someone above me already posted, I also fully agree Apple has seriously messed up with these keyboards, and in general appears to have a major problem with their design priorities (both in hardware and software). But that doesn't mean their platform isn't great (for me, even the best available) for many use-cases. If you forget about keyboard problems, high price, and for some (very narrow subset of) use cases insufficient specs.
The other commenter makes good points re: the cognitive cost of switching platforms, but let me give you another point of view: the Apple ecosystem is, actually, shockingly good.
My Apple Watch unlocks all of my Macs. When I join a new WiFi network on my iPhone, those credentials are immediately available to my iPad. When my iPhone rings, it pauses video playing on my Apple TV until I ignore the call. To send a link from my iPad to a friend on WhatsApp, I can copy the link on my iPad and paste it into WhatsApp on my iPhone - automatically. I can use my iPhone as a remote camera to insert a photo into a Notes document on my Mac with one action. The list goes on.
Yes, there are absolutely problems and Apple has made some dumb choices (I don't mind the butterfly keyboards but I hate the razor-sharp palmrests...), but overall it's incredibly cohesive in a way that I feel lots of people don't really grasp.
> When my iPhone rings, it pauses video playing on my Apple TV until I ignore the call. To send a link from my iPad to a friend on WhatsApp, I can copy the link on my iPad and paste it into WhatsApp on my iPhone - automatically.
I get what you appreciate, but its not for everyone. I like my tools smart but still 100% predictive by me. Like one device erasing the clipboard of another device.
> I get what you appreciate, but its not for everyone
I know you didn't mean it this way, but for illustrative purposes this is precisely the kind of reasoning people use to downplay the value of an ecosystem, whether it's Apple or Google or (eventually, I assume) Samsung.
"I don't want this, therefore it's not a valuable thing."
Of course no product will be (or should be) the be-all, end-all solution for everyone in the world. The fact that it isn't shouldn't be a mark against it or against the people who choose it, though.
Come to think of it, this is applicable to a huge number of products and strategies in our industry.
1) SMS/iMessages synced across all devices and able to send from any of the devices e.g. Mac or non-4G iPad.
2) 2FA codes received on your iPhone are automatically populated in Safari text fields on your Mac.
3) Safari window opened on an iPhone will appear as an icon on the Mac so you can easily pick up where you left off. Works for a number of other apps as well. And in every direction.
4) AirDrop is really great for quick, adhoc file transfers.
The built-in messaging platform (iMessage & FaceTime) is brilliant. Microsoft shoud've done the same since they bought Skype (and back then Skype was actually good software) but instead they decided to turn it to garbage.
I don't understand how Microsoft or Google managed to screw up messaging so bad.
It is a level of utter incompetence (especially from Google) that surely is unrivalled. I mean what Apple has implemented really isn't all that complex.
I mean, LinkedIn was always bad, but what changes were you talking about? I can't recall noticing anything different on the site in nearly a decade. Only thing I can think of is the ability to accept all invited.
They used to have a good native iOS app back in the early days. They now replaced that with an Apache Cordova or React Native app (actually it’s probably too shitty to be a React Native app).
It is the worst pile of shit I have ever used. I’ve used non-native apps like that before but this is the worst I’ve seen so far.
And of course, the app has the usual dark patterns around trying to get you to share your contacts, add a photo (there’s a persistent banner at the top of the feed asking you to add a photo and follow some “sources” - hashtags full of spam that is - even though I’ve had the account for 2 years now so they clearly should know I am not going to do any of those things no matter how many times they ask).
Microsoft also has Lync (now renamed to Skype for Business in what must be one of the worst naming decisions since Javascript). Then there is Teams, of course.
When I switched from macOS to linux, the things I missed the most were AirDrop and being able to text from my computer. I'll admit I still haven't found substitutes for either that are nearly as nice.
Just a data point, I desperately hoped the SMS iMessages thing worked (my wife can thumb type way faster.. how to get competitive edge..) but never worked between a iPhone SE and MBP for me. The messages just never showed up on the MBP despite all the tutorials I followed. That’s great that it worked for you but let’s not pretend SMS conveniences should inform purchasing choices for computationally intensive data analysis projects.
That palm rest corner is razor sharp even compared to earlier MBP designs, and it finally made me get a silicone palm/lower arm rest.
It is probably the best purchase I’ve made the last few years, I’m so happy with it every single day and it just makes working with laptops such a joy.
Make sure to get an extra wide one, mine is something like 70cm wide and I can keep my mouse and laptop a good distance apart and have the silicone support under both my arms.
The use case was server side data analysis. If it’s important work the researcher should get the much much more powerful server and run Linux like most sane people do. Who cares if your server can pair with your Apple Watch or use WhatsApp.
For all we know, the researcher could've also mistaken their real RAM requirements and 64GB would give them equal performance. I'd rather walk them through the options and then let them make the decision that they're most comfortable with, rather than mandating something that they don't want and which might make them less efficient as a result.
The research project in question will use as much RAM as is available, and we already have 128gb machines available, and access to larger. Why, for just running some MATLAB scripts through SSH would you need to stay with the Apple ecosystem for that?
I have no idea. Could be some OS X package oddity, or maybe they just like to AirDrop stuff to themselves?
In any case, I suspect if you do a little discovery with that person - what specific problem are you trying to solve by staying with a Mac? - you'll find the answer. You might even be able to convince them to change their order if you find it's something that can be easily worked around in a way they hadn't thought of.
As someone who has been on the researcher's side of this conversation, I can tell you that I'm always happy to discuss my reasoning with someone in your position who's genuinely trying to help me. On the flip side, I get very annoyed when they're just being obstinate because they disagree with my choice on spec (and this is an endemic problem in corporate purchasing orgs.)
Yeah I get your point of view. I have a MBP. I also maintain a HPC cluster. I didn’t blindside this person with a refusal, rather I asked what use he had for a maxed out iMac pro. When he said it would be used essentially as a shared server for remotely running data analyses, I explained the other options (dell server mentioned above).
As the IT guy I also have to deal with when these macs break or they are misconfigured, which happens a lot more easily than the Windows machines because the latter are in a domain and managed. The Mac guys are way too “I know what I’m doing” until they can’t get the printer working.
If Mac didn’t involve huge increases in price and integration pains for the organization I would be less negative but that’s how it is.
Also since you mentioned research, in my domain people buy those MacBooks because they can, because they are a status symbol, just to run Word and read PDFs, because all the big people in our field have macs. I see this as a cult to be honest.
Have you considered that, alternatively, those people choose Macs because they find them nice to use or that they prefer OS X to Windows? The Apple cult definitely exists, but the anti-Apple cult is equally real and to be honest they both blow my mind.
I’m sure you’ve enumerated a number of “user stories” of PMs in Apple but none of that should apply to a public sector research project involving computationally intensive data analysis. This guy needs a dual socket Xeon with tons of ram and none of the BS
I get what you're saying, but...if more people in tech thought of themselves as PMs (whose primary job, sidetracked though it may be in some places, is to develop a sense of empathy for their customers...) we'd all be in a better place.
But on the other hand, iCloud is shit. The rules for what photos sync where, and which ones are safe to delete from my phone are puzzling, to say the least. Music syncing rarely goes smoothly because some tracks, for some unknown reason, can't be copied due to DRM. Podcast management is a nightmare, partially because the app is so badly designed, but that is compounded by podcasts not being on the device you want them to be on. (I have gotten into situations where I can't download a podcast because the app thinks it shouldn't or doesn't need to or who the hell knows.) Family sharing is a joke. Very difficult to know who can see what, (which has led to mild embarrassment at times).
Should have told them to buy an old Apple Pro tower and max it out with new kit. This way you can actually make a machine more powerful than the ones that they currently sell.
Depends on what your definition of "powerful" is. If it has to do with CPU or RAM or SSD performance then no, you cannot max out the 2012 vintage Mac Pro with kit comparable to what the current iMac Pro ships with.
There just isn't much choice in the market. It's been windows or apple for a long time.
Windows and the laptops that come with it has gotten a lot better since the (imo) vista low point that got a lot of current mac users started (or back). But, there are still aren't many choices.
I was hoping android (or even iOS) would lead to some interesting new laptop choices but if you're in the market for a pc, it's still a pick-1-of-2 choice.
Vista wasn't a low point. It had its flaws and was (apparently - I didn't notice but was running top of the line hardware so can't really tell) a resource hog but it was still a pleasure to use compared to Windows 10.
The problem with Vista largely wasn't the OS itself.
It was:
- They changed the driver model from XP and a lot of 3rd parties either didn't have compatible drivers out at launch day (or anywhere soon after), or had buggy, unreliable ones.
- They set the minimum hardware requirements too low and so a lot of garbage was sold at the low-end of the market with a Vista sticker that was never really going to be able to run the OS well.
If you bought a new, higher-end device with Vista, you likely had a decent experience.
TBF, I still find that I just prefer using MacOS to Windows. Windows has definitely improved, but my Mac just doesn't slow to a crawl while something updates or indexes in the background, which happens to me in Windows still. All the time.
I think that's a perfectly legitimate answer. It's just a shame that the available hardware to do so is currently terrible.
I (and plenty of other people) will like Windows once it:
* has a consistent UI instead of 3 control panels with icons and UI paradigms ranging from Windows 95 to Windows 10.
* ships with quality applications that don't try to eat the entire screen to display 2 lines of text (pretty much all "modern" built-in apps are a disaster in that regard)
* has an App Store with decent, curated apps. Now I'm not sure if stores are the future on desktops, but Apple at least seems to be able to keep the crap at bay and actually have some decent productivity apps in it. Windows Store? Oh yeah, knockoff Flash Players and similar scams, and near zero apps you'd actually want to pay for.
* doesn't come with ads nor invasive telemetry that sometimes re-enables itself after updates (don't mention the Enterprise edition which you can only get in volume, so no solution for freelancers & small businesses)
* doesn't force a stupid phone-style lockscreen on non-touchscreen machines (I'm sure you can disable it with a Group Policy or registry tweak - my point being, I shouldn't have to spend hours doing that - macOS comes with reasonably sane defaults in comparison)
* has a start-menu search that actually works and doesn't surface irrelevant crap from their failed attempt at a search engine.
* has a calculator that doesn't take 10 seconds to load and then asks me to "rate" it (seriously? can't believe I'm saying this)
* proper QA - since Windows 10 the quality has gone down the drain and it feels more like a half-assed Linux distribution except that it has ads and you still pay for it
MacBooks definitely have their flaws, but overall it's still worth it and I write off their price to the cost of doing business (even if I had to buy a new MacBook every few months it would still be worth it for me). Microsoft (and their OEMs) can have my business once they put out a decent OS that actually feels polished and works for me, not against me. They managed to do it with Windows 7, not reason they couldn't do it again.
I went for a Yoga 730 2-in-1. Superior to Macbook Air in every aspect other than having to deal with Windows - but with MacOS quality dropping and Windows improving on the WSL front the tradeoff is now worth it to me.
I have been very happy with my HP Elitebook x360. It has some user upgradability (ssd, battery), has been rock solid so far, has a great screen, Wacom stylus + touchscreen, and lightweight.
As someone who alternates between windows and mac I was going to knee-jerk reply to your post explaining why your criticism wasn't valid and windows is actually good enough, but then I took the time to carefully read it and I have to say it's spot on. The ways you describe are exactly the ways that windows is bad.
Still, for me personally the software lead macOS has over windows had shrunk far enough a few years ago that I opted for a thinkpad over a macbook pro. I love that thinkpad, it's an excellent machine. YMMV.
don't mention the Enterprise edition which you can only get in volume, so no solution for freelancers & small businesses
I agree with your larger point and most of your bullet points, but just as an FYI to anyone that's looking into Enterprise edition: you can get Enterprise licenses in small volumes.
Because of various data security clauses in some of our contracts, and MS's refusal to discuss issues like HIPAA compliance with respect to telemetry, I looked into getting Enterprise for our small business and found that there are resellers (I have experience with CDW and mychoicesoftware.com) that will provide small numbers of licenses -- in fact, I started with one license with each provider. Right now we have 2 licenses through mychoice and 4 licenses with CDW.
It's a pain in the ass because it's a subscription service and you're dealing with two parties for support (the reseller and MS) but it is doable.
Just wondering as to why I have to deal with a reseller (and find one - it’s not like they just give you a link in the system settings saying “hey, want enterprise? Get it here!”).
This is one of the few places where their miserable App Store can make a difference, and yet they don’t even use it.
Totally agreed -- the answer is that MS apparently wants to placate their resellers, so they limit sales through that channel. Like I said, it sucks, but it's possible.
The lock screen is hilariously stupid. Every single time I pop open my surface go, I put in the first characters of my password, only to realize oops, I've gotta swipe up / press enter.
That is literally the worst implementation. Even Linux which fell for this stupidity too (GDM has a locksceeen) at least does the good thing that any typed character automatically dismisses the lock screen and is typed into the password field.
> * ships with quality applications that don't try to eat the entire screen to display 2 lines of text (pretty much all "modern" built-in apps are a disaster in that regard)
Windows never has shipped with a lot of built-in apps.
Calc used to start slow, not an issue anymore. It is also open source now and seeing more and more features being added to it.
> * has an App Store with decent, curated apps.
The app store has a much better selection, heck I installed Inkscape from it the other day!
Part of the problem is the Windows 3rd party consumer app scene died off when Mobile came around, and on top of that a lot of small utilities that are commercial on Mac have always been free on Windows, so the expectation of paying for smaller apps never was there.
The amount of creative apps available though, wow. Having a lot of pen first devices means there is a flood of apps using ink. The ecosystem there really impresses me.
But honestly? The number of 3rd party paid apps I am running
that would be "app store appropriate" is number at 1 right now, and I have a fair number of third party apps running in the background to customize my machine.
The top Windows software consists of either large productivity apps (Adobe), free as in beer apps (Spotify) or free as in speech apps (Notepad++)
> * doesn't force a stupid phone-style lockscreen on non-touchscreen machines
I actually had a chat with the developers in charge of the lock screen. I honestly forget what it is doing, but I remember that the initial screen being shown is actually there for some good technical reason.
Also you can just hit any key on the keyboard to dismiss it. By the time my monitor has turned on it is gone.
> * has a start-menu search that actually works and doesn't surface irrelevant crap from their failed attempt at a search engine.
I've ranted about the start menu for years. Often times on this very site.
It, honestly, doesn't suck anymore. Except for on my ~8 year old Desktop that was upgraded from 7->8->10, with a number of insider/beta builds along the way. That machine has distinct issues with its video drivers and explorer loves crashing every few minutes making the start menu a no go. Having
But hey, dev machine, console is all I need anyway.
> * proper QA - since Windows 10 the quality has gone down the drain and it feels more like a half-assed Linux distribution except that it has ads and you still pay for it
Agree. Except, outside of candy crush (wtf MS), I haven't seen any ads.
My Mac keeps asking me to sign me up for a bunch of paid cloud services though. That is annoying. I can come up with a list of complaints about MacOS just as long as your list of complaints about Windows. And I've had Linux package managers run update and leave me with an unbootable system. (Hasn't happened for quite a few years now though, so fingers crossed and all that!). I guess that is one more thing Windows and Linux have in common now days. :|
As for MacBooks vs Windows, well, lots of Windows laptops have a superior keyboard, better specs, and the advantage of not paying an arm and a leg for proper RAM or a good sized SSD. Mac's do have those nice trackpads.
tl;dr everything is garbage quality has gone downhill, get off my lawn, someone please re-hire all the testers that got laid off years ago from apparently every tech company in the world.
> Windows never has shipped with a lot of built-in apps.
But the ones it did ship with were pleasant to look at and were actually designed to get work done, not waste space (see Vista’s Windows Mail, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Media Player, or even the legacy Control Panel).
Now it feels like the developers were given the task to fill up the entire screen, but no budget remained when it was time to actually develop features, so they increased font size & padding on the very little they had developed and called it a day.
> Calc used to start slow, not an issue anymore. It is also open source now and seeing more and more features being added to it.
It’s still the “new” calc which has the overhead of their awful UWP platform. I mean UWP makes sense for some stuff but a calculator? What was wrong with the legacy calc.exe? Not to mention the new calc has telemetry (yes, in a calculator, you heard me right) and they rejected the PR which removed it.
> free as in beer apps (Spotify) or free as in speech apps (Notepad++)
Seems like a perfect fit for the Store? They could have a team that reaches out to freeware/open source developers and packages their apps for the Store. If anything, that would help offset the amount of garbage that’s currently in there.
> I remember that the initial screen being shown is actually there for some good technical reason.
Mac and Linux (using LightDM) don’t seem to have that reason, so whatever it is, it’s more about laziness (not wanting to work around the supposed limitation)... oh and the fact they can use the lock screen to shill their sad search engine and/or ads.
> It, honestly, doesn't suck anymore.
Is the start menu fast? That’s another thing I noticed compared to Windows 7, the start menu on 10 has a slight delay while it was instant on Windows 7. That’s another issue when you’re used to pressing the Windows key and then typing whatever app you wanted.
> My Mac keeps asking me to sign me up for a bunch of paid cloud services though. That is annoying.
Haven’t noticed them myself (I am logged into my - free on the 5GB tier - iCloud account so maybe that’s why) but I heard Windows 10 trying to push OneDrive & Office 365... oh and I think they also try to push their browser if you attempted to install a third-party one.
> I've had Linux package managers run update and leave me with an unbootable system
Not surprising, but then again I’m not bitching about Linux (and nobody should) because it is free. However, when a paid, commercial OS like Windows 10 falls down to the same standard as Linux distributions (built by enthusiasts in their free time) you’ve gotta start asking questions.
Agreed about the hardware choices, but personally I’ve never felt the need for top of the line hardware anymore - my 12” MacBook (with dual core CPU and 8GB of RAM) is sufficient for my development work. In the rare cases I need to do CPU-intensive stuff (like compiling OpenWrt the other day) I get a beefy machine off a cloud provider and build it there - still more pleasant than dealing with Windows or Linux full-time.
It’s hard to weigh the Mac ecosystem heavily when it’s obvious that it is a dead man walking platform. How Apple handles the iTunes transition will be the turning point.
Knock on Windows, but it is a living platform that Microsoft is investing in. We all laughed at Windows 8 and Surface, but if you’re still laughing now, it’s because you haven’t looked.
>I was hoping she talked more about this part, but brushing it aside by bringing up "Apple ecosystem" is pretty unsatisfactory. It does tell you, though, that Apple has its target demographic by the balls, and broken keyboards are certainly not chasing them away.
It's more like, I'd rather pay another sum (assuming I have it), than have to suffer the experience of Windows or desktop Linux (and I've used all three for decades -- in fact professionally, it's all Linux work).
But of course, I'd rather didn't have to pay for a broken keyboard fix, or suffer the broken keyboard. But the experience on the other side is so much worse to me, that it still trumps that (possibly because I can afford it, although just barely -- I've resorted to using external keyboards with my 2017 MBPr).
The "ecosystem" (e.g. I'll lose my paid apps, or such, is a non-factor for me).
My last company gave us iPhones, and I was excited to try an Apple product without giving Apple money.
Wow, I felt like I was using a phone that was 5 years old.
I only imagine Apple users have Allegory of the Cave effect, they don't know whats out there. Leaving the cave is lots of work, so they enjoy whats available for them.
I'll list my problems, I don't expect this to go over well, but since you asked-
>Apple's podcast app was glitchy/laggy.
>Apple maps took me a 'long' way, but it didn't know traffic was bad. I give them a 50% pass.
>Apple maps telling you to turn at the last second...
>The home screen is not on the same level as Android, no widgets in 2019.
>Controls, I felt like things werent intuitive, but thats an opinion thing.
>Updates, oh my god, it seemed like every day I needed to update, and every time I needed to sign in, and enter password
>I didn't like the animations, they took too long. Maybe I could have turned them off.
I can't think of anything else about the iphone product, so I'll let everyone tell me these are 'features' that are great.
Then there is an entirely different list about Apple being 'evil', being anti-competitive, closed, hackable, anti-consumer, poor treatment of workers, etc.. I consider working and buying products from 'evil' companies bad capitalism. I don't see them doing anything to remedy these.
Apple apps have nothing to do with iOS. You can use many apps. I'm using 4 different map apps and Apple maps is not among them. Check out google maps for example or try to find one that local people used (I had good experience with TomTom in Europe). iOS has widgets on other screens, home screen is just apps launcher. Controls are opinionated indeed and I feel myself better in iOS world without that strange "back" button which can do anything. Not sure about animations, I think that there are settings in accessibility options for those, but I'm not sure, never was an issue for me.
Frequent updates seems to be a good thing. I don't update myself often, and my phone complains may be once a week or month, definitely not every day.
I'm using iPhone and I did some Android development recently. I bought quite recent phone (cheap as hell, of course, but it's not slow). Sorry, Android is still not going to win over iOS for me. Price is awesome, yeah, that phone for $200 is as good as my $1000 iPhone, but Android is for very different kind of people than I am. And even that advantage seems to vanish in new versions (e.g. it seems that you can't record calls with new Android anymore).
I don't really want to bash on people using Android. It's free OS after all and that's awesome, it allows many things that are not possible with iOS. But not everyone does not know what's out there. It's not like Android is some hidden treasure, it's everywhere and most people saw it, they just made a different choice.
There are many little things, I just don't feel that Android UI is as polished. I can live with them or in some cases I probably can customize things, but it's still irritation.
Here are some random ones:
* When I have to enter pin (6 digits) I must press "OK". iPhone unlocks after 6-th digit automatically.
* It seems that Android app developers prefer the ad model. I don't have a single app on iOS with ads. Yet it's hard to find a single app in Android without ads. And I hate them.
* I spent something like 30 minutes trying to add a second phone number to my own android contact. I did not succeed. Theoretically I have to go to Google profile and add it there. But that button was not there. With iOS me is just another contact that I can edit as any other contact.
* To turn off all radios (airplane mode) I have to swipe from top, then swipe again to uncover the full menu, then swipe again to go to the right menu and only there I can click to enable airplane mode. With iOS it's one swipe and one click. I guess that I can customize this screen with Android and I can't with iOS... I don't want to bother, actually.
* I hate back button philosophy. I don't want to switch to other apps with back button. I prefer back buttons in app UI.
* I can't tap top bar to scroll to the top. Some websites provide that button as part of their UI, so may be it's just an iOS habit.
> When I have to enter pin (6 digits) I must press "OK". iPhone unlocks after 6-th digit automatically.
So Apple leaks the length of your password, Android does not. Okay.
> I don't have a single app on iOS with ads.
I don't have a single app on my Android with Ads. I pay for my apps to support the developers, otherwise I could easily add a hosts file or firewall to block ads in apps. I'm not an iOS user, so I don't know if a local hosts/firewall is possible with iOS.
> I spent something like 30 minutes trying to add a second phone number to my own android contact.
PEBKAC. I found it super easy. If I'm reading your comment correctly, you had to create two contacts for yourself just to have two phone numbers for yourself in iOS!?
> To turn off all radios
It's one swipe for Android too...
Your last two issues are just personal preferences.
After watching Louis Rossmann's live repairs and informed bitching, I bought an almost maxed-out Lenovo T480 on the President's Day sale and hackintoshed it. Water-resistant, backlit keyboard that's awesome and isn't crazy loud/fragile. 16 GiB, WQHD (could be brighter), Samsung 1 TiB 970 Pro and giant extended battery. 9 hour run-time. MIL-spec rated.
EDIT: I had a pre-Retina A1278 mid-2012 MBP with 16 GiB and 2 SSD's for a long time. MagSafe 1, okay keyboard, generally bulletproof for a while until the external ports and logic board traces started corroding from humidity and temperature extremes. :( I bought a broken screen MBP for $170 USD to get a working logic board cheap to recover and migrate off. Donated to a sane-but-poor itinerant writer/journalist/commercial fisherman.
I doubt hes under the delusion that people will stop buying apple anytime soon, and even if they did, it shouldn't be too hard for him to pivot to doing more general repairs.
I updated my work laptop last year to the 2017 model and I immediately determined that I would wait for a better keyboard design before updating my personal laptop. Preferably one without the touchbar, or at the very least with a physical escape key.
May be the only one that thinks this but changing up the keyboard so much on all devices has ruined me on all of them. The old MBP feels weird now I’m used to the new one and old PC keyboards feel weird too, the ChromeBook keyboard feels weird, etc..Hmm how about velvet that smells like lavender wouldn’t that be nice?
i am absolutely laughing at this macbook pro 2017 i bought. the keyboard has been replaced 3 times now...the screen was replaced for stagelight effect(broken connector)...they replaced the whole top bit for that(everything north of the hinge gets replaced)
i finally pawned it off on someone else and they promptly fried the motherboard due to water damage(the air intake ports lead directly to the motherboard so good luck to any starbucks warriors out there) so that got replaced too.
Ship of theseus in action - a macbook story. only the bottom baseplate is from the original macbook at this point.
They do care, but Apple has a monopoly on making MacOS hardware and people are unable to “vote with their wallet”. Same thing with iPhones and the headphone jack.
Though on that front I feel like they did the Appleish thing: had an excuse to remove the jack (waterproofing), moved the industry in the direction they wanted, released a product that everyone loves (AirPods).
Thanks. My first actually had a gap in the corner, but no issues getting that replaced. It allowed me to go from the i5/8/256 to the i7/8/256 as the latter wasn't available when I ordered - i7 was only with 4gb.
I shall certainly be wary when I do get around to upgrading this one. Lenovo Australia are pretty easy to deal with though, fortunately.
You can famously pour water into a Thinkpad keyboard without any damage.
Try that with a Coke or fancy Starbucks drink and you'll have sticky residue that requires you to replace the keyboard or clean it very, very thouroughly.
I'm not sure about the 2017 models, but looking at my 2015 MBP I can easily see liquid spilled onto the lower display and hinge being deflected into the vents, especially if the bottom of the machine is propped up at an angle.
Apple makes shit hardware now and has for a few years. The Apple of old is gone. People need to accept that. The keyboard is shit. The trackpad is too big. And the screen has issues too. Desktop/laptop software, other than OS X, has always been shit. OS X is slowly turning into iOS which is a locked down piece of garbage. This is reality and no amount of fanboyism is going to change that. The alternative is Windows which is an adware riddled spy machine or Linux for which every year is the year of the desktop but not quite. I suppose a Hackintosh could work for some people too who want the OS X experience but don't want to deal with shit hardware. There's plenty of choice in the Windows world for people that don't mind spyware and adware. And Linux is pretty much the same year in, year out. Those are the choices for serious computing. We need to get used to them. I know what I'm going with next upgrade.
Literally my favorite thing about the MacBook Pro is the keyboard. I do not understand the beef with it (aside from stuck keys which can happen to others).
I tried, but I don't really feel much sympathy for someone who buys a product with a 40% premium that's effectively a status symbol masquerading as a piece of hardware.
To be honest, I'm quite giggly over this whole ordeal.
I tried, but I don't really feel much sympathy for someone who buys a product with a 40% premium that's effectively a status symbol masquerading as a piece of hardware.
Oh come on, this is getting really old. A lot of people (most Mac users that I know) pay the 40% premium because they want macOS and the Mac application ecosystem. Sure, there are people that will buy it as a status symbol, but that's a crude over-generalization.
Also, a Surface with about the same specs sells at about the same price at our local retailer. The Surface Laptop 2 with a Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD is 1449 Euro, the MacBook Air 1409. There are some differences like a touch screen (Surface), Touch ID (MacBook), higher PPI (MacBook). But for all practical purposes, they are in the same class and have the same price. A similarly spec'ed Dell XPS goes for 1399 Euro without a HiDPI screen.
I drive a 7-year old subcompact and you're telling me that the Mercedes S-Class is not that expensive because it's only $10k more than the BMW 7-Series.
Those are two quite modestly-spec'd laptops with fairly high price tags. I bought a rebranded Clevo with pre-installed Ubuntu 4 years ago with an i7 and 16GB of RAM for around $1,000. Does it have cool features like an all-aluminium construction or a nifty touch-bar? No, but it's a highly functional machine and has been quite reliable as a daily workstation (I once dropped it from a second-floor balcony and didn't have to visit a "Genius" since I'm actually allowed to open it and work on it myself).
Not so great at impressing peers, perhaps; however, I can eat all the sandwiches I want over my keyboard and it still works.
Those are two quite modestly-spec'd laptops with fairly high price tags. I bought a rebranded Clevo with pre-installed Ubuntu 4 years ago with an i7 and 16GB of RAM for around $1,000.
Sure. I am just saying that there is no big markup for Apple compared to other vendors. If you want a laptop with the same specs, screen, trackpad, weight, and thinness as a MacBook Air, you are going to end up in the same price class as a MacBook Air.
I am not arguing for thin laptops, light laptops, Magic Trackpads, or whatever. Different people have different requirements. But a lot of people buy MacBooks based on their requirements and not for status.
I think there is at least one thing that we can agree on: the Touch Bar is completely unnecessary and a gimmick ;).
MacBooks aren't a status symbol anymore. You only tell yourself this to feel superior instead of considering that there are actual reasons people prefer macOS and, yes, the ecosystem over Windows or Android. Many of these reasons are cited in this thread.
Running Ubuntu on T480s. Nice machine, plenty thin and really lightweight. Touchpad is nice, no pinch-to-zoom on linux but two-finger right click is finally working it seems (click, not tap). Battery life could be better, getting ~4hours on Ubuntu 18.10 with tlp installed (and I thought 6hrs on the 2016 Macbook Pro was a downgrade :/) I miss the mac apps though, linux apps got frozen in time somewhere in the early 2000s.
My experience with the XPS 13 has been pretty meh. Most things work reasonably well, except for using USB-C for an external monitor and the keyboard isn't holding up as well as I'd like. My biggest gripe is the wireless- there's a room in my house where every other laptop gets plenty sufficient signal (mb air, chromebook, windows) BUT the xps gets such a weak signal it's almost impossible to browse the internet.
If I wasn't worried about bricking it and all the config tweaks needed to get things like sleep and power management to work, I'd throw linux on the air and call it a day.
Recent XPS models use a "killer" branded wireless card that's soldered to the motherboard. I suspect things would be better if you could use an Intel card (as is used on most other premium laptops)
X1 Extreme is a better choice imo, up to 64G (replaceable), 2 m.2 slots, a GTX1050 for casual gaming or ML and a 4K display. I have one on order.
There is also the P1, which comes with a Xeon (!) option and Quadro P1000 graphics. The market for the P1 is pretty specific, but if you need those nVidia certified drivers, this is the one.
Edit: obviously you wouldn't run Linux on the P1 if you bought it for the certified drivers. It would still work though.
I get my X1 Extreme on Sunday -- had to order through a friend in the UK because the price in Thailand is nearly 2 times the UK one and in any case nobody has one.
Been a big fan of the thinkpads for 20 years. All of them very solid machines that just last and last, and never had a problem with running Linux on them
I ordered the X1X as a replacement for my 2013 rMBP.
One of the requirements I had was that I can use the single cable USB-C 'docking' stations we have at the office, like my colleagues do who are on the new macbooks.
The great thing of the X1 is (imo) that is has USB-C with TB3 and charging capability like the Mac, but it also has 2 USB type A inputs.
That said, charging over USB-C is not ideal, the supplied 100W Lenovo power brick (unfortunately with proprietary connector) will charge the laptop much faster. It wouldn't even surprise me if the laptop actually loses charge under high load when connected to a USB-C charger. My current MBP also does that with a 60W charger connected.
I use the P1 as a company provided laptop. It works very well, but the thing is a tank. It's probably twice the weight as a Macbook, and the battery life is about 2 hours or so. It has died if I have many meetings in the day.
Honestly I'd rather just have a desktop at this point. But I don't get to decide what hardware I use.
I've been using company a provided X1, X1 Yoga 1st and now 3rd gen.
I had several issues with the arrow keys on the X1 Yoga 1st edition.
Tactile feedback while pressing but without actual keypress action on the up arrow. We had a lot of 15 of those, and the issue was present on 8 of these.
3rd edition now has the same issue on the left/right touchpad buttons (the physical ones). If you press don't press on the dead center of these keys, you feel the physical feedback, but there's no keypress action. Again, we got a batch of 15 of those, out of which 10 had this issue.
For the 1st edition the shape of the key was the issue (slant on the membrane), while for the 3rd the key is just too soft (plastic bends before pushing on the membrane).
This is the most brutal behavior a button can have. What's the point of physical feedback if it's broken?
The monitor backlight on all the X1 laptops we have (we're using them since 5 years) developed bright spots. The black level of the screen degrades pretty quickly too, settling after 3 months of normal usage. If you turn on a "fresh" X1 it has significantly more contrast than what you'll typically get a few months on.
Overall, it's still a great line (up and beyond than the HP "elitebook" series), but the keyboard and button issues are really irking me up and the Yoga 3rd edition IMHO has a worse keyboard then the 1st overall.
I sadly cannot compare with the XPS series as I never used the series long enough to judge.
I don't understand the failure of the butterfly keyboard? I haven't had any issues with my 2017 macBook and it seems to keep kruft from getting under my keys (A problem I had with the older macbook keyboards)
I also live on my macbook so it's constantly in use, and much to my displeasure, around food.
You seem to be a rare case. I'm also a heavy user and got keys stuck a lot and actually broke two keys (I did nothing out of ordinary). I certainly like the feel of the butterfly switches, but they really are incredible frail.
I was happy with the feel of the 2017, however after a few months a couple keys got stuck to the point of it being unusable. I took it in for repair at the Apple Store, and after repair, touching the ID sensor would cause the machine to freeze. Soon after, more keys started getting stuck and I just put the thing in a drawer and pulled the 2015 back out, which is what I'm typing on to this day. I've been using Apple computers exclusively since the lciii in the early 90s, but my next laptop will not be a Macbook.
You are very lucky. I had three students in my office hours recently and of the four of us, all with butterfly keyboard MacBook Pros (some with the updated keyboards), three of us have had keyboard issues such as the spacebar double registering presses or other keys not registering a press at all.
Within my family, everyone that has a newer MacBook Pro has had keyboard issues.
I bought a used Lenovo X1 off ebay for $300 and that has become my daily driver, despite getting the keyboard repaired on my MBP. It doesn't get close to the same battery life as my MBP, and waking from sleep is a little iffy sometimes, but in terms of reliability and usability it far exceeds my experience with the MBP.
That's an amazingly high percentage, and suggests staggering incompetence at Apple HQ. A company with that kind of market cap should not be in this situation.
Yeah it will be expensive to fix out of warranty. Apple has extended the warranty to 4 years for the affected machines, but it seems like after that we’ll be screwed. The resale value of these things will suffer because it will cost $600 to get them fixed at that point.
They’ll be fine for use with external keyboards, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy a used one for use as a regular laptop.
I was just like you until a couple weeks ago. No grime in the keyboard, heavy use, took it with me everywhere, used it every day since 2016. (That being said, it was/is in pristine condition--no scratches, dents, or drops.)
But one day it just happened. Nothing to provoke it--hadn't been eating over it, hadn't been treating it any rougher than usual. E key started bouncing (repeating). Rarely at first, but it got worse over the course of a week. Canned air didn't fix it--had to ship it out.
I can't really say it was a bad experience, though. They handled everything without issue. I walked into the store--no appointment--and they took a look at it immediately. I didn't pay anything despite being out of warranty and without AppleCare. Had it back in my hands a few days later.
Personally, I love the feel of Apple's butterfly keys. I like the short travel distance and the satisfying "click" they make. I've had plenty of similar issues with scissor switch keyboards; it's just that they're easier to repair. Pop off the key, give it a good blow, and it's as good as new, though you might end up inhaling some ancient crumbs in the process. Allegedly, that usually doesn't work with butterfly keys, for whatever reason, and they're hard to remove without breaking.
They're actually really easy to remove without breaking, in my experience. You just have to use a very thin piece of flexible plastic to get under them from the top.
Then you're lucky. We have two 2017 MBPs and one has a broken R key. Broadly speaking (a) the failure rate is really high and (b) the fact that it can only be fixed by a complete front plate replacement makes this a punishing error. In the old days if a key broke you could just replace that key most of the time. Here you need to replace half the chassis, which necessitates a trip to the Apple Store.
This the real world: every physical product has tolerances and exhibits problems, and most that are expensive require maintenance. Moreover, new features are going to be problematic.
Consider your statement as it would apply to cars for example: they are in constant need of repair, tweaking, maintenance.
Butterfly keyboards have never been a problem for me, the issue is really the rate of problems, how they are fixed, who pays for it.
"This is engineering, having something fail is not acceptable."
No. Engineering is not about 'zero failure' at all. It's about characterizing the failure properly.
Have you ever had the pleasure of working on a physical, manufactured product? There is no such thing as a perfect run. There are always defects, there are always failures for any product at scale.
100% of Apple products have a measurable failure rate.
The only Eng. problem where we shoot for 0 failures are a) Space Systems and b) Nuclear tech. Maybe some other things.
But even in Space and Nuclear ... there's still a tolerance!
We launch people into space with some kind of estimate as to the likelihood they will all die.
Magplug charging is magical! Easily the best contribution to computer design from Apple, ever.
And then it gets dropped...
I wonder if the poor hardware has to do with increasingly outsourced R&D. I mean, everyone at Apple is rich, why should they bother with all the hard details ...
Whilst Apple was the first company to bring magnetically coupled power cabling to computers with MagSafe, the idea/design wasn't original; it's been a common design for kitchen appliances in the Japanese market since the year ~2000.
The cool thing with USB-C on the Pros is you can charge from any of the USB-C plugs, on both sides! On my old Mac the magsafe plug always seemed to be on the wrong side no matter where I seemed to be (Murphy's law). I wore out multiple mag safe cables from being bent too sharply around to the opposite side of the laptop where the nearest plug to my desk, bed, seat in the airport always seemed to be. Then there is the dream, that one day, one day, we might have a single charging cable for all of our devices; laptop, phone, tablet etc. Ironically Apple is the one preventing that day from being a reality right now by hanging on to the lightening connector on the iPhone. I would gladly give up magsafe for USB-C to become the one true connector and charger.
That's not what Apple says on their docs. They say:
"To charge your Apple Pencil (1st generation), plug your Apple Pencil INTO THE Lightning connector on your iPad. You can ALSO charge it with a USB Power Adapter by using the Apple Pencil Charging Adapter that came with your Apple Pencil. "
(Emphasis mine).
Besides, you shouldn't need to plug it that way to pair it either.
You said "You plug the Pencil into the iPad to pair it. It comes with an adapter that you use to charge it with a regular cable."
As a response to the parent, your comment makes sense only if you meant to imply: "you're not supposed to plug it to charge it, only to pair it".
But if you meant to imply that as the right way to do things as according to Apple, you're wrong.
Apple suggests to plug it to the iPad to charge it (not just to pair it), and mentions the charge cable only as something you can "also" do.
In other words, Apple doesn't say you're just meant to "plug the Pencil into the iPad" only to pair it, and not only it doesn't discourage users to charge by plugging to the iPad, it suggests it.
Say you are tasked with writing something that can be done 2 different ways. Both have the same end-result.
In one way there's a single step.
In the other way, there's 2 steps and it involves another piece of equipment.
How might you write the documentation on how to do that thing?
Personally, I'd go with two sentences. The first that describes how to do the thing in one step. The latter, how to also do it in two steps and with another piece of equipment. I'm genuinely curious, is there a better way to approach that?
>Say you are tasked with writing something that can be done 2 different ways. Both have the same end-result.
That's my whole argument. That Apple presents it as 2 different equally good ways to achieve the same end result (and even mentions the pencil-protruding-dangerously way first and the second way as an aside).
In case you've lost context, I made the point to answer the parent commenter, who said that "the pencil-protruding-dangerously" is not a problem, because you're meant to charge the Pencil the cable-extension way in the first place (and sticking it directly to the iPad is just needed once at first to "pair it").
Well, my point is, if that's "how you're meant" to do it, (a) nobody told Apple, (b) Apple themselves suggested this fact to no one, and in fact went on to recommend the "just stick it" way as (a) equally good as the other, (b) first.
>Personally, I'd go with two sentences.
This is only OK if you assume both ways are equally safe and good. Which is my whole point: that Apple assumes that, and presents them as such -- when in fact they are not.
As for how I'd do it: "You can charge your Pencil with the provided cable adapter. In an immediate need, you can also just stick it on your iPad, but be careful, it's a brain damaged way, and it's easy to snap the egde that way".
Ah, I see how I misunderstood the point you were making in context. I read the word "can" in the point where it's not there.
I still don't agree that it's a particularly dangerous method of charging the device [1]. But I get that you'd change the wording since you feel it's dangerous.
Once they decided to make the mouse chargeable it was inevitable the plug would go underneath. A plug that allowed you to continue to use the mouse wouldn't stand up to the stress and strain of being dragged around your desk.
I'm confused. You mean like on a wired mouse, where the cord is constantly exposed to the strain of the movement and is typically just fine for many many years? I have Microsoft Intellimouse devices which are many years old and work perfectly. The differences between a USB plugged in cable and a permenantly attached cable don't seem relevant in this instance.
To be fair, Apple's industrial design team seem no more likely to come up with a remotely adequate sinuous strain relief channel than to put a telescopic antenna or physical keypad on the iPhone. The MacBook Air and iPhone are literally the only consumer electronics gadgets whose cables I've needed to replace due to fraying at the join, and that's with adapters released after Apple lost class action lawsuits over strain relief issues with the previous generation Macbooks.
I am consistently annoyed when Apple, who has the magnetic charging plug patent until 2025, refuses to use it in exactly the applications where it would be most beneficial.
> whichever idiot thought putting the power plug at the bottom of the Magic Mouse was a good idea.
For those not familiar with the Apple Mouse, the commenter means that the power plug is on the part that you’re supposed to have on the mousepad, meaning you can’t charge it while using it, at all.
Easily the worst way to design a mouse, ever. I don’t understand how it was approved.
I take it you've never read Apple's instructions before:
"To charge your Apple Pencil (1st generation), PLUG YOUR Apple Pencil INTO THE Lightning connector ON YOUR iPad. You can ALSO charge it with a USB Power Adapter by using the Apple Pencil Charging Adapter that came with your Apple Pencil." Emphasis mine.
Apple not only designed this BS way to charge, but also promoted it as the canonical way on their official docs (even on their videos).
Because (a) the emphasised parts describe the very method the parent said isn't how you're supposed to charge the Apple Pencil (b) they show what Apple not only recommends this method, but recommends it firat and without any qualifications, whereas what the parent said it the "canonical" way is mentioned as an aside qualified by "you can also".
I could just paste the whole excerpt, but I wanted to "rub the relevant part "in the face", so to speak.
I take it you are familiar with the concept of adding emphasis to a statement to highlight some part, right?
If you're asking for the specific use of caps, it's because italics don't look very well in HN, and I can't bold IIRC.
Apparently I've been flagged and I'm having trouble finding the parent comment. What I recall was "YOUR" also emphasised, and I did not follow why. Underscores around the word also work for emphasise.
I only found about the adapter after almost a year of owning the 1st gen. By then I was already desperate to switch to the new, vastly improved design.
It was just a terrible idea, no excuses. Requiring a dongle only adds insult to injury.
Right! This is one of my biggest peeves with anti-Apple complainers...there are a few legitimate complaints with some of Apple's current designs but this isn't one! Apple Pencil 2 wireless charging nonwithstanding, this is the better design. Plugging in to your iPad is much better than having to dig out a cable, plug it into the Pencil, plug the other end somewhere else. Just think when your Pencil dies, which is more convenient?
>Just think when your Pencil dies, which is more convenient?
Just think, when your Pencil plug end snaps, because it was protruding from the end of the iPad and you've dropped it, or hit something, or made a sudden move, etc, how convenient would that be?
Do you feel like the design of the 2nd generation Pencil for the 3rd generation iPad is _better_?
Personally I don't like moving from Lightning to a more-proprietary non-standard magnetic interface. I think the first generation Pencil has a much better design in this regard, since now we have it working with the standard iPad and iPad Air.
But, I think the design of the first generation Pencil is pretty good, so I'm curious of your thoughts since you find it to be a bad design.
>Do you feel like the design of the 2nd generation Pencil for the 3rd generation iPad is _better_?
Yeah, very much so. Both the charging and also the better grip.
>Personally I don't like moving from Lightning to a more-proprietary non-standard magnetic interface.
That's a non issue with the Apple Pencil, because it's already a proprietary product itself, inherently tied to the iPad. It's not like it's a cross-product/cross-platform device, and needs a standard charging interface. You'll need an iPad to use it in the first place, so might as well charge it with one.
No arguments here on the grip, that's clearly a win.
It _is_ cross product insofar as it's on the iPad, iPad Air, and iPad Pro. This is pretty useful for me and my partner since we can simply share a single Pencil since neither of us rely too much on it. But that's just an exception case, I'm sure.
Lightning is proprietary, but very common. I've got a half dozen Lightning cables lying around. If I want to pair the Pencil to a new device, I simply plug it into the Lightning interface and it's ready to go.
I was trying to think of a better phrase than what I used "more-proprietary", since both are at 100% proprietary that doesn't come across how I intend.
Basically I strongly dislike these weird interfaces that we're putting on the iPad -- the one for the keyboard wasn't great, and the addition of the one for the Pencil also doesn't feel great. But, if that's the direction that best serves the function provided then I suppose it's fine. My hope then is that we get those to move down to the lower-end devices (as we've seen with the Air getting the keyboard cover).
I have not once heard of anyone having their Apple Pencil’s plug break because it was protruding. There is significant strain relief and it would take significant effort bordering on malicious intent to break it.
I've used the Magic Mouse, found the bottom charger to be a non-issue in practice because it stays charged pretty much forever anyway, and charges enough to get you back on your feet if you somehow let it run all the way down in just a minute or two.
Pencil 1's terrible, though. It's led to many a "oh I could use my Pencil for this... oh it's dead, yet again. I'll just charge it... but I want to keep using my ipad, so where's the pinkie-nail-sized adapter again? Eh, screw it, I'll do something else."
[EDIT] also, when's it done? Dunno. Oh and the tiny adapter is directional, though either side kinda fits whichever way you put it, but I guess putting an arrow on it or making the ends different colors wouldn't have been "beautiful" so there's a little getting-it-right ritual every time. Get it wrong and it won't charge. Which, again, any little LED indicator of charging status would've solved that problem, too.
The one that provides strain relief for lateral movements that may occur whenever anybody touches the other end of the lever you just jammed into the socket, with the fulcrum being the point of contact with the connector.
This is another example of sound engineering taking a back seat to user-facing design.
Instead of a fully removable cap, I would have used a tether to keep it secured to the device, and the connector would be on a short cord with a 90-degree connector. A removable clip would then secure the device to the edge of the pad as it charges. Otherwise the whole thing could flop around without damage to the male connector or female socket. Though this is all with the benefit of hindsight, everyone ought to know better than to plug anything into anything else without some strain relief.
Have you actually used the mouse? I haven't, but hearing from people that have actually used it (and not gotten all worked up about how bad this design is in theory) - they actually thought it was the BETTER design as the battery charged ridiculously fast. Meaning when they ran out they would charge it for a minute and got like a couple hours of use. This resulted in them actually using it as a wireless mouse instead of a wired one.
Same with the pencil 1st gen - it charged so fast that it having a male port actually made sense as it made on the go charging feasible.
> Meaning when they ran out they would charge it for a minute and got like a couple hours of use.
That's a minute longer than you should have to wait to keep using your mouse. I can appreciate that they minimized the impact of the poor design, but that doesn't mean it's not a poor design.
> This resulted in them actually using it as a wireless mouse instead of a wired one.
Does that improve functionality at all? It sounds like the same style-over-substance design that's led Apple to sacrifice important functionality for unnecessary size/weight cuts in the last few years.
I have used the mouse, yes— I understand what you're pitching, but I think that ultimately the user can decide whether they want it to be a wireless mouse or a wired mouse, depending on their needs.
Putting it on the bottom did nothing but remove that optionality for the user, and that can be really frustrating.
Unless the reason it charged so quickly was because it connected to the bottom of the mouse, I don't see the justification.
The thing charges in no time at all, and lasts forever. It is a seriously overstated "problem".
It is my work mouse for 99% of my working time, and as a very heavy user of it I love the mouse, and it just isn't something that enters my mindspace at all.
I feel like this conversation is one half people who have and use the mouse, and who have no problem with it, and one half people who don't use the mouse and imagine that it's some critical issue that they would face daily. And the latter are busy down arrowing anyone who isn't outraged about a non-issue.
The magic mouse is easily the best mouse I've ever used. It feels nice, works great, and the capacitive touch feature is one I now consider mandatory.
Could they put the port somewhere else? Not with the current design (and it's a design that works spectacularly well for flicking and scrolling with fingers on the touch surface -- it seems to be a bit more than a design for looks). Well I suppose they could put it on the left or the right, but that would be stupid. They can't fit it on the ends. So they should have designed it for a non-issue that users of the mouse have no trouble with?
I use the Apple Mouse on a daily basis. This criticism is blown way out of proportion.
I agree that it's a very ridiculous placement, but do you have a better idea where it should be placed? IMO, this is the best option given the constraints.
The usual ridicule is that you can't use it when it's charging. To me, it's a non-issue at all:
- When the battery drops to a low level (4% I think?), you will see a notification on your device reminding you that the charge is low. So have never been caught in a situation where I needed to charge the mouse while using it.
- The battery lasts a long time. Apple claims that it lasts 2 months per full charge. Based on anecdotal evidence from myself and a friend, it lasts 3 months per full charge. So this 2 months claim isn't based on some super unrealistic assumption that Apple makes. So why is this important? Because at 4% when you receive the warning notification, the mouse can still run for another 2 days! (Assuming constant usage everyday and one full charge lasts 60 days, then 4% = 60 / 100 * 4 = 2.4.)
- Finally, it charges super fast, too. A couple of minutes of charges can run a full day. So if you come to the office to find your mouse out of charge (because you forgot to charge it for the past 2 days despite the notifications), then plug it in before you get your coffee and you're good to go.
My point is that, yes, the charging port placement is ridiculous, but 1) I don't think there are better options and 2) it's really not that big of a deal because it is extremely unlikely that you'd need to charge while you're using it.
> but do you have a better idea where it should be placed?
How about having a small notch at the front of the mouse, like every other mouse I've used? It can then be simultaneously wired, and usable. Maybe you're right that it's usually not frustrating, but I was trying to use this mouse at my office once and it wasn't charged, and it seemed pointless to wait before using it.
> then plug it in before you get your coffee and you're good to go
What if I don't want to test my mouse before coffee? What if I have urgent emails to answer?
I understand that it isn't a world-breaking choice, but I don't understand why they would choose to change this. I love Apple, but this seems like one of those situations where a company changes something just to change it, claiming it's new and innovative, but actually reduces usability.
Yeah, I thought it was a huge, stupid mistake when I heard about it, until I was handed one at work. The charge lasts weeks, it's not like it runs down in a day or two. It's not a major problem.
The point isn’t that there are solutions to keeping it charged. The point is it’s a needless concession for Apple to make when other wireless mouses have found elegant ways to achieve simultaneous use and charging. This wasn’t an instance of Apple reinventing something that will later seem so obvious.
It is obvious. People will leave wireless mice plugged in all the time out of superstition or worry. Apple’s way elegantly eliminates that possibility. Anybody who wants to plug in their wireless mouse may purchase another.
I agree it's an edge case, but it's got to be infuriating if it used up its last bit of power before a presentation and you just have to wait there because they couldn't bear to make it look a tad less pretty.
Is there any other context in which Apple would tolerate an avoidable two minutes of wait time? Definitely not for their web pages!
I use this mouse with my desktop PC. It's got a port in the front to connect via USB to charge while allowing the user to use the mouse. Furthermore it supports wireless charging.
I'm shocked Apple thought putting it at the bottom was a good design decision.
> Easily the worst way to design a mouse, ever. I don’t understand how it was approved.
I do. It was on purpose. They do not want people using the wireless mouse as a wired mouse with a short, thick cord not designed for it. Which is totally what my parents would do.
That's easily solved by disabling the mouse when it's connected to the cable. If what you're asserting is true, at by disabling it they could have avoided this endless mocking.
The original Mac (and IIRC Lisa) had neither function nor arrow keys. Apple wanted users to use the mouse to move and to prevent software developers from building software that didn't feel like a Mac program.
> They do not want people using the wireless mouse as a wired mouse with a short, thick cord not designed for it. Which is totally what my parents would do.
That's still stupid as hell, as it basically asserts you're not allowed to use your computer if your mouse is out of batteries.
Logitech's MX master came with a super long cable (it's at least 150cm / 5 ft), pretty flexible, and the charging port's at the top of the mouse. When it's out of battery it just becomes a wired mouse for a short while, it's super convenient. The Anywhere 2S is the same, and for all that I preferred the VX Nano overall, not having to hunt for a pair of emergency battery when I forget/forgot to recharge the 2S is extremely useful.
In fact that's pretty much the only thing I dislike about my Apple Wireless Keyboard: if I forget to charge/change the batteries when it starts whining it becomes dead weight.
Or maybe they didn't want to support both Bluetooth and USB data communication. Or create user confusion if it didn't act as a USB mouse when plugged in?
>The idea is you weren't supposed to leave it plugged in.
The idea is I don't care about the idea. If I forgot to charge it, or come back from holidays and it's off, I want to be able to plug in and still work.
Like with every other mouse.
Not to mention: when the charge lasts so long (2 months) it's even easier to forget to recharge it and take it for granted. Unlike something you need to charge e.g. daily or so, this is something that stays out of your mind for months on end -- until it fails.
What if you're in the middle of collaborative work? What if you're playing a multiplayer game? Are you going to insist everybody else gets a cup of coffee too?
And after 2 months, the charge depletes when you need it the most and now you can't use the mouse (even in a handicapped state where you plug it in and use it at the same time) since the stupid charging port is on the bottom instead of being literally anywhere else.
I remain baffled some people just take whatever Apple shoves down their throat. It's a design _atrocity_. Just like Apple Pencil V1, iPhone 4 antenna issues, iPhone 6 bending screens, butterfly insanity on the MacBooks. I don't buy this 'you're holding it wrong'-attitude anymore.
And it's also completely different from removing a headphone jack – you could actually see that as a form of progress. But charging a mouse without being able to use it – try and convince me that is progress.
It's still an inelegant and goofy design — from a company that prides itself on caring about design and with a history of making fun of other companies' designs.
To me, it just reeks of laziness, just like the iPhone X "notch" and the Pencil gen 1 charging. In all these fairly recent examples, Apple basically gave up and didn't even bother trying.
> whichever idiot thought putting the power plug at the bottom of the Magic Mouse was a good idea.
Do you have one? It charges very quickly. Basically go make a cup of coffee and it's charged for the day+ when you get back. Leave it plugged in overnight and it's good for almost a month.
I just wish the touch strip had haptic feedback. I don't mind it, but often times I'll find that I've accidentally rested my finger on the escape key and can't figure out why applications/menus aren't working properly.
I read somewhere that it was a deliberate design decision to not make users think that while plugged in, it is a regular USB mouse. Indeed, I have a Logitech Bluetooth mouse with a micro USB port in its front. It turns out that this is for charging only, not for the mouse interface. This leads to some challenging troubleshooting when the battery dies or it otherwise doesn’t work.
It’s not just the keyboard, either. I’ve been buying Macs since they switched to Intel in 2006 and the most recent MacBook Pros are the most problematic I’ve ever had.
- Bluetooth seems to be fundamentally flawed at a hardware level. AirPods, Plantronics, doesn’t matter. It just randomly connects and disconnects as it pleases.
- USB-C dongles are a minefield of poor functionality
However, I’ve run Linux off and on since 2007 and Windows for 20+ years and I still wouldn’t give up macOS as my daily driver. Even with the issues above it still has an excellent display, I like the keyboard (waiting to start having issues), and the battery life is the best I’ve ever had.
I’m glad to hear desktop Linux works for some people, but I just don’t have time to a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose or b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update.
>Even with the issues above it still has an excellent display, I like the keyboard (waiting to start having issues), and the battery life is the best I’ve ever had.
I don't understand this.
I understand not liking Linux Desktop(I hate it, but LOVE LOVE LOVE Ubuntu Server, fav OS of all time)
And... the screen is what has you sold on Apple OS?
I'm flustered at this logic. Pretty screen-> Good operating system
I only imagine you use your laptop as a facebook machine. Would a cellphone do?
I send easily 8-10 hours per day looking at my screen. Screen quality has a large effect on how tied my eyes are at the end of the day. When I was younger it wasn't as noticeable but I'm not young anymore and my eyes are noticeable happier with the MacBook Pro screen that any other screen I've tried.
Pretty poor. At fractional scaling on Windows, expect that even preinstalled applications (Computer Management, for instance) will be very fuzzy. GNOME works fairly nicely, but as usual expect glitches and strange scaling problems with non-GTK applications, multiple monitors, etc.
I continue to prefer a screen where it has a high pixel density but is plenty usable without any scaling.
Dunno about Windows, but on GNU/Linux (Plasma user here) it's pretty solid these days. It's problematic on X11 only when you have multiple screens with different DPIs, but I connect external screens only for movies or slides, so that's a non-issue for me - plus if you're fine with Wayland (I'm not yet, but it's close) it's pretty much solved there.
Just like there is more to cameras than megapixels, there is more to a display than resolution. Simply saying “hidpi” does not necessarily solve the problem.
It is good experience to be able to buy Apple device and be sure that everything there is pretty good. Choosing among thousands of alternatives is pretty frustrating. What brand should I choose? HP, Dell, Lenovo, IBM, Acer, Asus, whatever? I need good display, fast CPU, good battery life, enough RAM. Pretty vague requirements. You are buying Macbook and it's just good, you don't have any regrets, because its CPU is one of the fastest, RAM is enough for most tasks, build is good, devices are just working with all drivers included, etc. I think that people love Apple because of that. They put their trust to this brand, they are paying astronomical margins and they expect to receive the best in return. It's hard to earn that trust.
>buy Apple device and be sure that everything there is pretty good.
The alternative is that you spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper.
This isnt an opinion, this is reality.
You can find a computer with better specs than Apple, cheaper. I'm not sympathetic to the 'mom' who doesn't know what RAM is, they get penalized by Apple for being an uninformed consumer.
> Will someone explain what this theoretical 'non spec' thing that matters is?
That's hard to do, since you're being vague about the meaning of "specs".
How about this: you find an example of a non-Apple laptop that you think has "the same specs" or better as a 15-inch MBP, and I'll point out how it's different.
> EDIT: Will someone explain what this theoretical 'non spec' thing that matters is? The Apple logo?
Mostly the OS. I don't cringe before plugging into an unfamiliar external display. The touchpad isn't so bad it makes me feel like I have to carry a mouse if I plan to use the device for any length of time. The built-in "office" suite of apps are my favorite I've used, anywhere. Preview is indispensable for working with PDFs—I've never even known PDFs to be more than barely tolerable to work with outside Apple's world. It's Unixy, so many of my preferred tools work natively on it. It has lots of built-in stuff that's less convenient or works less well on Linux (modifier key remapping, screen sharing, and more).
I've been around the block with Linux on the desktop. Around and around and around, in fact. I could tolerate Windows—not as a work OS, but for gaming, anyway—all the way from 3.1 to 8, but 10's aggressively unpleasant. Now MacOS is the only desktop OS that doesn't drive me to swear at it multiple times a day while using it. That's worth some money, when I have to use some OS just about 365 days a year.
Touchbar's beyond dumb and into "harms UX" territory, though. The keyboard two generations ago—on the fatter Macbooks that still had disc drives—is noticeably better than either since, and the butterfly keyboards are awful. Unfortunately every other option is so much worse that they can afford to screw up badly for years on end and I still can't bring myself to switch.
My answer would be pretty much the same. Although I prefer the fit and finish of Apple hardware, I could live with the hardware of a high-end laptop from another manufacturer. But I'm absolutely unwilling to give up MacOS in exchange for Windows or Linux (and I say that as someone who used Ubuntu for many years on the desktop).
If you really think marketing is the only reason someone could prefer a more expensive but lower horsepower car, then this conversation is a waste of time.
In response to your edit: if you define "specs" broadly enough to include the comfort and the color of buttons, then sure, "specs are all that matters", tautologically.
On the other hand, with this broad of a definition, no, there is no other computer on the market with the same "specs" as a Macbook Pro.
Native iOS development (for almost a decade now, jesus), and I've yet to find a touchpad that feels as good (tell me another to go try and I promise I will, although I'm sure it'll be tough to overcome my own muscle memory/bias).
As for the touchpad, those of us with ThinkPads just use the TrackPoint, which is (IMO) better than any touchpad. Off-brand TrackPoint-esque pointing sticks (on Dells or HPs) are usually absolute junk and go to maximum speed no matter how lightly you push it.
The touchpad has the advantage of being immediately intuitive, but after a little work on an old ThinkPad (an X220 from eBay is about $130 shipped) you’ll probably be able to appreciate both sides. I like how I don’t have to leave home row to do a little clicking around.
> As for the touchpad, those of us with ThinkPads just use the TrackPoint
Our standard-issue work laptop is a thinkpad, and I find the trackpoint super annoying. It's good for quickly adjusting the cursor while typing (which you can do just fine using the keyboard), but awful for moving long distances or scrolling (lack of inertial scrolling).
Have you tried the MacBook Touchpad? All my windows and linux machines have been Thinkpads and while I prefer to use the trackpoint on them, the touchpad on a MacBook wins easily in my experience.
In my experience: it’s ”unix” on a laptop that just works.
Easy access to up-to-date tooling through brew: zsh, docker, bash, vim et al.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Linux only user since the 90’s and for many years used the dell xps developer edition.
But, the mac touchpad (I know, I’m doing it wrong) and screen coupled with superior battery time as well as solid sleep/wakeup makes for a great experience.
The new air, without the ridiculous touchbar and updated keyboard is actually pretty great.
I don't know much about brew (or MacOS at all) but docker is native linux technology. Docker for Mac runs linux in a VM in the background. The MacOS docker experience is similar to running anything in a VM: slower, memory limits, poor IOPS.
True, but the overhead is not that bad due to HW virtualization support.
Macos can use the xhyve hypervisor (bhyve port) which again points to “unixy” roots — it runs freebsd for example.
Through the years I spent quite some time hacking about to get bsd running on other hypervisors, and for the longest of time it was just a hassle with abysmal performance (vmware esx, xen/xenserver).
Docker on osx is by the way completely seamless from a UX perspective.
As a mobile/laptop dev experience I still think the new air is great. ;)
macOS is its own thing, where some functionality is provided by some very old versions of BSD tools. But using it feels pretty different from using a modern BSD variant.
Yes Linux does indeed just work on new Dell laptops now. I can personally testify that wasn't always the case. In years gone by it was a world of pain for the 1st 6 months while open source developed drivers for hardware they hadn't seen until the laptop was released.
That all changed when Dell started selling versions of their laptops with Linux pre-installed. And it didn't change a little bit either, in many cases it was a complete reversal. Drivers got released on Linux _before_ Windows - in particular Intel video drivers were repeatedly released on Linux before Windows in my case.
I presume that's developers are moving to Linux now. That was driven home to me just now when reading the Bling Fire post here, learning Bling Fire is an internal library used by MS's Bing search engine - then noticing all the instructions had a very nix'y feel, and the benchmark environment was Ubuntu.
The apple hardware: crap keyboard, any slight usage leads to blaring fans and immediate thermal throttling. Options mean end users could actually pick something that fits their needs and not have to live with what Apple thinks YOU need. There have been times when choices haven't been good on the non apple side but in recent years the apple's few top down dictated choices on the hardware side have led to clearly inferior products.
My non-negotiable requirements for a laptop are as follows. If there were a non-Apple model that fit these criteria, I would consider switching. Do you know of any?
(1) Unibody metal construction
(2) Extremely high-quality and high-resolution screen
(3) All-SSD storage
(4) High-quality trackpad with multi-touch gesture support (all gestures must work perfectly 100% of the time, and the acceleration/deceleration should feel physically natural)
(5) Unix-like operating system pre-installed out of the box (no having to set it up myself) and fully supported. (Doesn’t have to be macOS. Ubuntu or FreeBSD would be fine).
That kind of looks like throwing a darf, and then painting the bullseye after.
In any case, the Huawei Matebook pro x would seem to fit all but the default unix OS requirement.
I dont think any PC comes with any unix os by default, other than apple, but given the ease of setup I'm not inclined to view that requirement as anything other than a way to select what you wanted a first
I guess your definition of "ease of setup" is not the same as mine.
If I could be guaranteed that everything work perfectly out of the box with no weird driver issues when I burn and install an Ubuntu .ISO, I agree that the OS being default is not a necessity.
But I've only heard of this being the case on a small whitelist of "known to work well with Linux" devices, like Thinkpads, etc., which don't fulfill the other conditions.
Again, I'm not just arguing ideology, here: I'd be genuinely happy for you to show me a non-Apple laptop that meets my criteria, if one exists.
> any slight usage leads to blaring fans and immediate thermal throttling
This has been my experience with Windows machines, interestingly. On the other hand, if my Mac makes fan noise I know exactly what caused it and it's going to be a compile job I kicked off, not some random driver spinning out of control in the background…
Lots of reasons. I’m pretty comfortable with my nerd cred (was programming graphics algorithms in C in high school) but buying a windows laptop was a Byzantine experience for me. I need a good screen, good battery life, and good keyboard/touchpad. There are Windows laptops that have one or more, but it’s hard to find one that has all four, and even if you do, there is no guarantee that the same model will have the same qualities on the next iteration.
Because they are so cost sensitive, Windows laptop makers build SKUs based on the hardware that’s available and cheap. So maybe you get a great display, but there was a good deal on crappy touchpads. Or you get a lottery where the same laptop can come with screens of widely varying quality (Toms hardware just did a piece about this with respect to Lenovo).
My Windows laptop purchase recently went like this. I was looking for a replacement for my 2012 MacBook Pro Retina 15”. Dell was out because of coil whine (which has been a problem with Dell machines since I owned an XPS 15 17 years ago). I stare at text all day so a high-DPI display is clutch. But almost every PC vendor make you choose between 4K and 5 hours of battery life, or HD and 10 hours. No well balanced 3K display with 8-10 hours like Apple has. (Again, this is because they’re stuck with what the hardware manufacturers are offering, they don’t have the clout and margins to demand custom panels.) Same thing with Lenovo’s 15” laptop options (they do have a 3K 15” display but it’s quite dim). HP didn’t have Precision touchpads. The Surface machines I’ve owned have been a Q&A disaster (it took them how long to get connected standby working?) And the 15” Surface Book is too much fiddily convertible tablet shit I’d never use. I ended up with an X1 Carbon, which was a bit of a compromise because I wanted a 15” screen. But it ticked the boxes of good screen (WQHD), good battery life, etc. It took a lot more than 30 minutes, and in the end I didn’t get exactly what I was looking for.
Even then it wasn’t sunshine and rainbows. Lenovo has awful quality control. I had to reinstall the Os to get rid of Lenovo crap-ware (and gained 2 hours of battery life in the process). I got a few dead pixels within 6 months. They replaced the screen, but now the bezel is peeling (it is just a fucking sticker, on a laptop that’s $1,500 even heavily discounted). The fibocom WWAN module has never worked properly (like requires a reboot every day after getting disconnected). So the one paper advantage over an apple machine is a dud. (And again, it’s because Lenovo sources parts from whatever is on sale that day—the Sierra modules that come on other iterations of the X1C are great.)
> spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper.
I'll humor you.
dell.com
* Choose between home or work → I'll go with work since it's for development
* Choose between Latitude, Vostro, Inspiron, Precision, XPS, G Series, Chromebook, and Deals → I'll go with Precision as I'm a professional creator (whatever that means).
* Choose between 3000 Series, 5000, or 7000 → I'll take 5000 for the performance
* Choose 5520, 5530, or 2-in-1 5530 → umm I'll guess at 5530 because it's a little cheaper
* Now it lists 4 actual models I could buy
The comparable mac is 11% more, but if you buy an Office license for Windows and can use Pages/Numbers on a Mac then the price is the same.
The real difference in my opinion is that Apple does a good job of directing you to the right machine, and you know that your purchase will be good. Whereas Dell and others offer a myriad of confusing options (e.g. Inspiron vs Vostro?) and some of those options will be complete crap.
I'm sure I could repeat the process and get a better deal elsewhere but it will certainly take me more than 30 minutes to find it. So, yeh, for price sensitive consumers you can optimize for price. Not all of us 'nerds' prioritize for price however. I work in an office with Dells, Thinkpads, Asus, etc. Some of those machines are complete duds, as well we are starting to cycle out 2 year old laptops because their specs when purchased were crap, while my 2015 mac still outperforms those.
There are several Apple laptops buying once is still a decision to make based on cost. And it might not work out like mine where the space keeps on decreasing and on restart it comes back. If not for ios programming i would have preferred a windows/linux laptop.
How about wifi? I am experiencing random wifi disconnects ever since the mid-2014 MBP all throughout the current-gen 12” MB. It’s so infuriating that I had to disable wifi and Bluetooth altogether and switch to a dongle with an Ethernet connector. I changed routers and even my home (!!) to see if the issue persists (it does). And I’m not alone, forums have similar cases dating years prior to me.
You really don't have to do that. For example: I put Ubuntu Mate on a 2009 Macbook that could not run MacOs anymore (too slow). I had to install a wifi driver, and that was it. Everything else worked out of the box.
My current Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop is running the same OS, and needed 0 drivers installed.
I put Antergos on an Intel Nuc (that I later switched to Ubuntu Server). Again, no configuration, and no issues with drivers.
I will mention that Mate has some font scaling problems if you're running two monitors with different resolutions (spoiler: you can't), but I know that other distro's handle that just fine.
Another legacy hardware user here. I have a HP laptop from early 2008 that pretty much can't run anything. I no longer have Linux on my daily driver, and I'll need to occasionally break out that laptop for dev purposes. Ubuntu has been a godsend for that laptop.
Unfun fact: although the Wi-Fi spec is backwards compatible, a lot of places only serve 802.11n and forward making legacy hardware impossible to use on their network.
If you don’t have to tune Linux to get it to work, then why does every single complaint about Linux’s battery life in laptops get met with “install TLP?”
Of course Windows is shit in this respect too these days. I got two extra hours of battery life from my X1 Carbon by wiping the disk and installing Windows LTSB. But even then I still have to police things, watching for driver updates or software installs that randomly leave some service running that keeps the CPU from sleeping. It’s like nobody tests these things.
The only thing I have had to configure on the last two laptops I've installed is, weirdly, to go to sleep when I close the lid.
The battery life on the X1 Carbon is about one and a half to two hours, which i think is acceptable given that the battery is reporting less than half of its original capacity.
I just installed OpenBSD to my ThinkPad X200. 5 hours of battery life, everything worked out of the box, and closing the lid suspends the machine, opening it up brings it awake. Every time.
I tend to go with older laptops, but they are definitely fast enough and I like how robust the experience is.
> If you don’t have to tune Linux to get it to work, then why does every single complaint about Linux’s battery life in laptops get met with “install TLP?”
That's evidence that there exists something that Linux users recommend to people who complain about having battery problems on Linux, not evidence of widespread problems with Linux that require expertise to get the operating system to "work" at all.
What's really happening is perverse incentive structures. Ideally all energy use of every app would be accounted for and, somehow, relayed back to the original "responsible agent" (e.g. a signed app being responsible for all its subprocesses). This then needs to be tied to some valuation.. in an app store, you could say e.g. lower commission based on energy efficiency, or just a higher ranking score.
Currently, resource usage suffers from the tragedy of the commons, and it will remain that way until we fix the incentives.
OSX is starting on that road, as you can see with the Energy tab in activity monitor. I wonder if they will take further steps with it, but it's a good start. (You'd then want e.g. browsers to allow push the accounting down to invidual sites; now we're suddenly attacking death-by-JS as well.)
One day! But until that day, you are right: nobody tests those things. Why would they? Honestly, if you're creating drivers for something, worrying about energy use is... is so inconsequential it's borderline altruistic. Who will ever, really notice? It's basically charity work. That needs to change.
Apple has public and private metrics for battery life that at least incentivize the internal teams.
There are also orders of magnitude difference between a sleeping device and an idle device, and an idle device to a fully loaded device. We are talking three weeks to 20 hours to 35 minutes. And that gap will only continue to get larger
I tried putting Linux on my 2015 Macbook Pro and found that sleep was totally broken with no workaround, which is a dealbreaker on a laptop. It was a known bug for a year before a patch hit the kernel to fix it, and that kernel didn't come with a standard Ubuntu install until a year after that.
Actually you don't have to do that, which is not the same thing at all.
I find this one of the oddest moves of those who (for reasons mysterious to me) find OS's worthy of advocacy. When you say to them 'with Linux I find X', their response is "no you don't". Where is the conversation supposed to go from there?
I install a couple of distros on every new laptop I buy, and perhaps once again during its lifetime. I have in reality found it a tremendous pain and time-suck, with each attempt taking a few days reading and fiddling, more than in total I've spent 'administering' desktop OS X or Windows over a couple of decades.
I've persevered out of a combination of nostalgia (I did run Slackware full-time for some years), wistfulness about some gnu/linux goodies (i3 etc), and ethical preferences. But on every occasion I just find it to be more time than it's worth. I have many more important things to do with my precious and limited time on this planet than mess with OS's
[ as an aside, I was prompted after writing the above to try again, and added a Fedora 29 partition to play around with. I'm pleasantly surprised by how much immediately works. Early days as yet ]
> USB-C dongles are a minefield of poor functionality
Since most of my peripherals have a detachable cord, I just bought a couple of USB-C <-> whatever cables and now I'm fully 'native' USB-C. Suddenly the couple of USB-A host devices I have around feel incredibly legacy (an old MacBook, Xbox One).
> Bluetooth seems to be fundamentally flawed / USB-C dongles
I do have a USB-C-to-many-things hub but I never use it now, yet it should be noted that the thing is so badly shielded that it throws WiFi down the curb every single time I used to plug a device or even SD card into it, so it might affect bluetooth too. I have zero issues with the same devices but using USB-C cables.
I have the same thing happening with a Maxtor usb stick. When I plug it into my 2017 MBP (via a usb-c to usb-a dongle), wifi connectivity will drop to what feels like an unreliable 1200 baud connection.
Apparently, it is an issue due to the metal unibody. It took me way longer than I care to admit to figure out the usb stick was causing the problem. :-(
Fun fact: try gently swiping your finger over the unibody while charging, and then without charging. You'll feel something like a vibration in the former case.
> but I just don’t have time to a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose or b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update
From my experience, troubleshooting macOS when it randomly decides to break is almost a Windows-like experience - lots of frustration and no sensible help on the internet (unless your problem is so trivial it gets solved by something like NVRAM reset, because this is the best advice you can count on online). I absolutely prefer GNU/Linux where, if something breaks, it's not that hard to get it back to sensible state.
Of course it depends, but I'd say that formatting and restoring from backup takes way longer than fixing an average system hick-up - provided that you have access to meaningful logs, which is where GNU/Linux works pretty well.
From about 7 years of troubleshooting mac problems, it's actually worse than Windows problems. First, you find people discussing the problem where everyone claims it doesn't exist and no solutions are found. Then you find the problem and solution for mac os from 2008, and that solution definitely doesn't work, but might also break things worse. Then you decide, it's best to just make sure your headphones aren't on when you start itunes in 2014, because there is a 10% chance of really loud static instead of music (mysteriously fixed in the next major release)
It really is kind of amusing how forum threads with Mac owners asking for help usually have at least a few people that instead of responding to the question take the opportunity to relate how their Mac has been working perfectly for them and never had that problem. I like my Mac and my Windows and my Linux boxen, I'm not a Mac hater, but I only see this on Mac related forums.
I've never really seen it for Windows forums -- everyone, including Windows fans, seems to admit at least Windows gets broken; so it's more hmm, that shouldn't happen, check this log or that log or do this rather time consuming thing (reinstall clean, etc).
For Linux forums, there is a small contingent of this never happens to me on Linux Yggdrasil, so try that. Except instead of a distro that died 20+ years ago and will not be getting updates, they have some other distro nobody has ever heard of and may not be getting updates.
And don't forget one of the most infuriating aspects of Apple community troubleshooting: The group of people questioning the premise of your problem and saying you shouldn't even want to do what you want to do.
Even worse than answers.microsoft.com. Ok, almost. (Let's not be too harsh here.)
I have gotten the same when posting to many technical communities. Sometimes it's a good thing (I've actually agreed in some cases) and sometimes it's awful.
I agree that it's infuriating when it's something reasonable that you're trying to do, but I've experienced this in many tech forums, and programmers have been some of the worst offenders in this category for me in the past, actually.
Oddly enough, with enough history knowledge and resources like Microsoft Windows Internals, I find troubleshooting Windows to be a dream compared to MacOS. If something acts funny on Windows, I have a plethora of free and open source tools to instrument internal systems and audit operating system performance. Meanwhile on MacOS, it seems like any program not provided with the operating system is closed source and costs $100 a year, and when something breaks, I don't even know where to start looking. My wifi is not playing nice with my home wireless router? No clue what the issue is, guess it's time for my twice-weekly reboot
Very much there with you. I run MacOS on my MBP for work. I built a workstation at home and run Ubuntu on it.
I decided to upgrade to latest Ubuntu drooling over the GNOME perf improvements and I have a system that wont connect to any network and the settings app won't open and would like to send a crash dump to Canonical :-(
I can afford such problems on my personal desktop, google the issues and spend a part of day fixing some poor QA release bugs, but not on a machine that I use and rely on for $ paying work.
I rather use rolling releases. This way the breakage is contained to 5-10 minute fixing sessions once in a few months, instead of a huge whole-day upgrading session every new release.
Does that mean you don't have such issues when upgrading from LTS to LTS?
No snark. Seriously asking. Are LTS versions generally better in this regard?
> Interim releases will introduce new capabilities from Canonical and upstream open source projects, they serve as a proving ground for these new capabilities.
I use AirPods daily with my 2015 MBP and never have disconnect issues. When I first got the AirPods it was far less reliable but I believe a firmware update a couple months after launch cleared up whatever issues I was having.
I happen to have two 2015 15" MBPs, both with Mojave installed. My personal laptop works flawlessly, no disconnects or issues. My work one has constant disconnects, unrecognized devices, etc. It's frustrating.
Also, the trackpads on Mac just work. I recently made a foray back into Windows a few years ago and was disappointed to learn that PC trackpads have made little progress in the intervening decade. Is it really easier to touchscreenify your entire software stack than to build a sane touchpad?
In terms of sensitivity it's good, but the new MBPs also have this enormous trackpad that makes it so I can't use the keyboard without accidentally swiping it all the time and moving the cursor in a way that does something I don't want.
I know I'm in the minority here, since I do so much on the keyboard and don't use the mouse or the fancy trackpad features, but it's really infuriating.
Edit: I must be getting old, because I much prefer the ~2015 MB Airs: no touch bar, yes appropriately sized trackpad and magsafe.
I'm 'old' too: when I finally decided to replace my 2010 15" MBP last summer I opted for a 2015 model. Keyboard durability, battery life and ports were the main considerations, but ease of repair factored in, too. (I mean, 1/10 is better than 0/10, right?)
The work-issued 2017 MBP I was using at the time is bit smaller and lighter but the bigger trackpad and brighter screen were not worth the downsides for a personal machine that I expect to use for at least five years.
I got my company to purchase me a 2015 last year too. Best choice ever. Love the keyboard, have spilled wine on It and it still works and I have all the ports I need!
Older Apple laptops had palm rejection that basically worked, but the palm rejection on the MacBook Pro trackpad doesn't work properly for many people, and there's still no fix for it.
This is surprising and disappointing, because Apple's iPad (for example) still has excellent palm rejection.
Combining the awful butterfly keyboard with the disaster of a trackpad, it's really one of the least usable laptops Apple has ever produced.
The only thing that has worked for me is to use an external keyboard and trackpad. ;-(
Meanwhile, if you're like me and don't like how the mouse or trackpad respond, you're SOL, because there is zero configuration allowed. Try using a non-magic mouse on a mac. It's hell.
I paid $20 for USB Overdrive, an excellent third-party driver, so I could continue using my ancient MS Intellimouse when its drivers took a turn for the worse. You can set speed and acceleration separately, and the curves are as good as the MS ones.
> I’m glad to hear desktop Linux works for some people, but I just don’t have time to a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose
So you are comparing a finely tuned OS for a specific hardware to using linux with whatever hardware you throw at it? Why don't you just pick a specific hardware that works with linux well e.g. thinkpads?
But does it really? I’m using Xubuntu on two different Thinkpads, an old T420 and a pretty recent T580.
On both, I have the same awful problems with waking up the laptop after it went to sleep mode (when closing the lid). It will wake up at first, allow me to enter the password in the screen locker, then screen goes black and that’s it. Have to reboot then, losing all unsaved data. Google search shows, plenty of people out there with the same problem, but the only “solution” seems to be “oh, just disable screen locking”.
So if Thinkpads are the known-good choice for Linux... then I don’t want to know how it behaves on other laptops...
The whole selling point of Macs - the lack of need to 'tune'. Yet I even had to do this with my 2014 model - otherwise, the laptop would run hot to the touch. It is troubling to see the trend happening.
I've tuned and configured my WindowMaker desktop in 2003, and it didn't change much since then, through many, many upgrades of hardware and software, switch to 64 bits, etc. Oldies are goldies. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
> a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose
Literally all you have to do is install powertop.
> b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update.
I've been running Linux desktop for almost 2 years now and I've never had that happen. Unlike when I used Windows, where a W10 update would be forced into my system and either change functionality or fundamentally break something.
I'm on a 2013 retina and wouldn't swap for the new ones even if somebody paid me to. It has regressed in a bunch of ways and the only thing I would get for that is a slightly faster CPU. Which doesn't really matter. If I had a significant workload, I would not put it on a laptop anyways.
You can very, very carefully remove them with a credit card.
However, they are VERY easy to damage. And even if you get the key off without breaking it, the problem is the butterfly mechanism is very fragilse and goes 'flat', it's not so much getting dust specks in there.
I had slowly been moving into the Apple ecosystem, buying an iPad, iPhone, and even a HomePod and Apple Music. I was largely motivated by a respect for Apple's stance on privacy. Then it came time for me to buy a laptop and I encountered these numerous reports of Apple screwing up one of the most basic parts of the computer. I couldn't justify spending so much on a laptop plus AppleCare, which would only result in getting another keyboard that suffers from the same problem.
I realized that this is what Apple lock-in means, and now I'm leaving their ecosystem. Whereas before I would tell friends and family to just get Apple products, now I'll them to buy a Chromebook or Windows laptop. Maybe this is why I keep seeing the newly released Macbook Air on sale for $200 off...
I am somewhat locked in to "the ecosystem", having an iPhone and an MBP. But the badly designed apps, the disaster that is iCloud, and the new MBP keyboard (the broken butterfly keys, the moronic touchbar) have motivated me to escape.
It's not entirely feasible, even with my minimal exposure. So I've compromised. My daily driver is a Darter by System76. The hardware is good enough, the battery life is good enough, the keyboard is fantastic, and Pop OS is beautiful. I still have my failing MBP, but it is demoted to a station for syncing my iPhone. I rarely touch it. When it dies I will replace it with a Mac Mini. I don't want to move to the Google ecosystem because of privacy issues.
Apple MacBooks lately are being priced on par with the competition. You want premium screen and trackpad - you will have to pay just as much for a windows laptop.
Just bought a Dell Precision, and out of curiosity, went through and specced one out to match an equivalent Macbook. The macbook was solidly 30%+ higher in price. They were pretty close about 3-4 years ago, but now they have gotten terrible. And that doesn't even consider the Dell has a better keyboard (and for me, a better trackpad).
I used Macs for almost a decade, but I'm crazy happy with my Dell running Ubuntu 18.04. Amazing!
My main complaint with their new keyboard design, not having used it enough to encounter any reliability issues, is that it’s just way too cramped to actually type on. I’ve since gone back to an older MBP, but while I was using the newer design I found the only way I could actually type on it was using an external keyboard. There really wasn’t anything wrong with the 2012/2015 form factor and I wish they’d go back to that.
I too had to go back to an older MBP, but not because the keyboard was cramped. My complaints:
1. Not enough tactile feedback from keys. I have to carefully calibrate the amount of muscle power I use to hit the keys, which paradoxically increases the pain in the joints of my fingers.
2. Lack of a physical ESC key. I touch type, and this makes writing code rather difficult.
3. Lack of USB port. Lack of HDMI port. Lack of magnetic charging port (which is very convenient)
Re 2, I remapped the tilde key to escape because it was driving me nuts. I do still want to type a tilde char sometimes, so that is now Alt-tilde. Thank goodness for Karabiner.
Everyone speaks about being ‘locked in’ to the apple ecosystem. I’m happy to be in the ecosystem and I’m happy to pay more for my devices. The alternatives are simply interior (having used all platforms myself). In particular when you are trying to work across multiple devices from different ecosystems.
Not admitting your mistake this much is simply lying. They have a severe honesty problem admitting their hardware faults. How is this legal? Imagine if car companies, instead of recalling their broken shit, just lied and quietly tried to fix it on next year's model...
When the free keyboard replacement program shuts down, and Apple still denies the problem, and Apple happily charges you $795 every so often to fix their mistake over the life of the machine, will it be fraud?
Lack of competition in the Apple ecosystem, plain and simple. I think people know this before making the jump. Or they work for a company that forces them into choosing between a windows or osx laptop. I'm in this crowd and I have no love for either. I despise apple hardware but hate windows itself far more.
Most people are best served with a good chromebook. That crowd won't be the ones frequenting this type website.
You're spot on, I'm sorry that you're being downvoted.
Apple Inc has a monopoly on regular users' hardware for their iOS/OS.
Windows, Linux, Android, Windows Phone OS (when that was a thing), did not. Companies were able to try and provide the best hardware in order to win customers.
Apple doesn't have provide the best hardware, regular users only have one hardware provider to choose from if they want Apple's iOS/OS.
(The average regular user is not going to make a Hackintosh.)
How much of an ecosystem is there between Apple on the desktop vs mobile?
I have an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods and there is definitely a strong ecosystem there.
However, I ditched the MacBook (due to keyboard issues) and went with a ThinkPad and have been very happy. The ThinkPad has iTunes, so I dont lose my music. I supposed there is iCloud integration, but that seems like a small reason to remain on Apple desktops.
Side note: Other benefits of ThinkPad
- 64GB RAM! Can run multiple VMs easily
- NVIDIA GPU for those who do CUDA work.
643 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadThat doesn't say much about whether it's a good idea overall, though.
I hate when I have to send my laptop in to Apple for 10 days to repair it because a speck of dust entered it.
So now I use a "keyboard condom" on it to keep dust out (despite Apple's explicit support article saying NOT to use one) and it's turned into the worst keyboard since the ZX80
Doesn't cover the TouchBar and helps to soften the noise.
[1] https://store.gouppercase.com/products/premium-keyboard-prot...
I like to use them so my laptop keyboard stays clean and helps soften the noise since MacBook Pro is designed to at least partially emulate a mechanical keyboard.
But it’s so so so infuriatingly shoddy. Cmd fell out on my previous laptop. On my current one most of the keys feel wobbly. Coupled with accidental brushes againt touchbar and the unnecessarily enlarged touchpad frequently failing at palm rejection this ends up being a very subpar experience compared to earlier models.
This type of user needs to be able to lock on to the arrow keys repeatedly and unconsciously without fail throughout the work day.
Apple's keyboard designers understood this and got it right for over 15 years. But that changed in 2016.
As of 2016, Apple's new keyboards provide zero affordances for these kinds of users and are completely unsuitable for real work.
You couldn't pay me enough to use one of these keyboard for writing code, and I certainly wouldn't pay my own money for one.
Ahem... I think you meant "hjkl".
Just joking ;)
Or, uh, did. Before, y'know, they stopped providing a T-shaped arrow panel.
I've always had a habit ofregularly clean my keyboards too which I think may have helped reduce the amount of dirt getting stuck underneath.
“of regularly”
With that being said, I've only had this MacBook Pro for two weeks, and so we'll see if it remains reliable over the next few years.
I’ve had to take multiple different machines in for repair. And each time I have to tell them to replace the entire keyboard, but they always want to blow it with an air can. Utterly infuriating.
Since then, my only complaint about the MBP is the arrow key arrangement, which I will never adapt to, and the goddamn useless, laggy yet hypersensitive touchbar.
When I have to use other people’s keyboards, I dislike their long travel now.
Oh come on. Having a keyboard that causes as little fatigue and soreness as possible over time is an unsolved and complicated problem. There's also noise to consider. And laptops don't have infinite room. These factors come after "does it make the characters?" but they are not unimportant.
if it helps, the butterfly mechanism fails at doing that if even a tiny speck of dust/grit gets in the mechanism
I was hoping she talked more about this part, but brushing it aside by bringing up "Apple ecosystem" is pretty unsatisfactory. It does tell you, though, that Apple has its target demographic by the balls, and broken keyboards are certainly not chasing them away.
Macbooks will get fixed the day tech journalists start writing articles about how they tried a Windows laptop and liked it.
But then again they actually test for foreign particle ingression:
https://solutions.lenovo.com/resource-center/pc-solutions/pa...
Between the broken keyboard and only 2 USB-C port, I hated that laptop. I know have a MacBook Pro with a 3rd generation butterfly keyboard (which has the dust seals) and 4 USB-C ports. I am finally starting to like MacBooks again. So far the keyboard has been fine. Touch ID on a MacBook is absolutely brilliant, flying through 1Password and sudo prompts is awesome. The new True Tone screen is awesome. The largest downside: MacBooks have become even more expensive than they already were.
Why did I stay on a Mac? Three reasons: 1) I use a lot of Mac-specific apps (OmniGraffle, Deckset, Things) that I absolutely love. 2) macOS is still a great operating system. 3) The hardware is still simply better. The last point two points notice now that I work remotely and I Skype with my colleagues nearly daily. When I Skype with someone with a MacBook or iMac, the sound quality is great and without a lot of distortion. When I Skype with someone that uses a ThinkPad or another PC laptop, the sound quality is typically bad, their mics pick up a lot of noise, and somehow noise cancellation seems to work quite badly. Then there are OS-specific problems (which may also be Skype bugs), e.g. if someone shares their screen with me, I see the mouse pointer when they are on a Mac, but if they are on Linux there is no mouse pointer.
If you use any system for years, there are many ingrained habits that are hard to unlearn. Then there are probably applications that they use that have no direct replacements on Windows or Linux (e.g. OmniGraffle). Sure, there may be applications within the same class (diagramming), but even if they are as polished, it takes time to become as productive in a replacement.
Most people who are not tech enthusiasts just want things to stay as they know them. For a normal user, switching to another OS and applications is like switching from QWERTY to Dvorak - a long, tedious process, that will reduce productivity for one or two years.
Somewhat ironically, using a unix-variant is the easiest way to stick to what you know. Windows and to some extend macOS has gone through some design fads. Apple ditches/replaces fully functional programs, such as Quicktime 7, Aperture, and iWork (it took many years to get linked text boxes back). Whereas on a unix, you can still work like it is 1979 if you want to.
I've been using all three major OS-es extensively for years, so for me switching wouldn't actually be that much of a problem. The simple fact of the matter is that I prefer macOS for almost anything, by far. No lock-in required.
Like someone above me already posted, I also fully agree Apple has seriously messed up with these keyboards, and in general appears to have a major problem with their design priorities (both in hardware and software). But that doesn't mean their platform isn't great (for me, even the best available) for many use-cases. If you forget about keyboard problems, high price, and for some (very narrow subset of) use cases insufficient specs.
My Apple Watch unlocks all of my Macs. When I join a new WiFi network on my iPhone, those credentials are immediately available to my iPad. When my iPhone rings, it pauses video playing on my Apple TV until I ignore the call. To send a link from my iPad to a friend on WhatsApp, I can copy the link on my iPad and paste it into WhatsApp on my iPhone - automatically. I can use my iPhone as a remote camera to insert a photo into a Notes document on my Mac with one action. The list goes on.
Yes, there are absolutely problems and Apple has made some dumb choices (I don't mind the butterfly keyboards but I hate the razor-sharp palmrests...), but overall it's incredibly cohesive in a way that I feel lots of people don't really grasp.
I get what you appreciate, but its not for everyone. I like my tools smart but still 100% predictive by me. Like one device erasing the clipboard of another device.
I know you didn't mean it this way, but for illustrative purposes this is precisely the kind of reasoning people use to downplay the value of an ecosystem, whether it's Apple or Google or (eventually, I assume) Samsung.
"I don't want this, therefore it's not a valuable thing."
Of course no product will be (or should be) the be-all, end-all solution for everyone in the world. The fact that it isn't shouldn't be a mark against it or against the people who choose it, though.
Come to think of it, this is applicable to a huge number of products and strategies in our industry.
1) SMS/iMessages synced across all devices and able to send from any of the devices e.g. Mac or non-4G iPad.
2) 2FA codes received on your iPhone are automatically populated in Safari text fields on your Mac.
3) Safari window opened on an iPhone will appear as an icon on the Mac so you can easily pick up where you left off. Works for a number of other apps as well. And in every direction.
4) AirDrop is really great for quick, adhoc file transfers.
It is a level of utter incompetence (especially from Google) that surely is unrivalled. I mean what Apple has implemented really isn't all that complex.
But Microsoft? Why the hell did they even buy Skype? Same story with LinkedIn - the entire product is garbage now.
It is the worst pile of shit I have ever used. I’ve used non-native apps like that before but this is the worst I’ve seen so far.
And of course, the app has the usual dark patterns around trying to get you to share your contacts, add a photo (there’s a persistent banner at the top of the feed asking you to add a photo and follow some “sources” - hashtags full of spam that is - even though I’ve had the account for 2 years now so they clearly should know I am not going to do any of those things no matter how many times they ask).
I don't use it anymore but I think this covers some of it.
It is probably the best purchase I’ve made the last few years, I’m so happy with it every single day and it just makes working with laptops such a joy.
Make sure to get an extra wide one, mine is something like 70cm wide and I can keep my mouse and laptop a good distance apart and have the silicone support under both my arms.
My desk isn’t really deep enough for both a laptop, a keyboard, and my arms to fit comfortably on it.
In any case, I suspect if you do a little discovery with that person - what specific problem are you trying to solve by staying with a Mac? - you'll find the answer. You might even be able to convince them to change their order if you find it's something that can be easily worked around in a way they hadn't thought of.
As someone who has been on the researcher's side of this conversation, I can tell you that I'm always happy to discuss my reasoning with someone in your position who's genuinely trying to help me. On the flip side, I get very annoyed when they're just being obstinate because they disagree with my choice on spec (and this is an endemic problem in corporate purchasing orgs.)
As the IT guy I also have to deal with when these macs break or they are misconfigured, which happens a lot more easily than the Windows machines because the latter are in a domain and managed. The Mac guys are way too “I know what I’m doing” until they can’t get the printer working.
If Mac didn’t involve huge increases in price and integration pains for the organization I would be less negative but that’s how it is.
Windows and the laptops that come with it has gotten a lot better since the (imo) vista low point that got a lot of current mac users started (or back). But, there are still aren't many choices.
I was hoping android (or even iOS) would lead to some interesting new laptop choices but if you're in the market for a pc, it's still a pick-1-of-2 choice.
Windows 10 is a low point.
It was:
- They changed the driver model from XP and a lot of 3rd parties either didn't have compatible drivers out at launch day (or anywhere soon after), or had buggy, unreliable ones.
- They set the minimum hardware requirements too low and so a lot of garbage was sold at the low-end of the market with a Vista sticker that was never really going to be able to run the OS well.
If you bought a new, higher-end device with Vista, you likely had a decent experience.
I think that's a perfectly legitimate answer. It's just a shame that the available hardware to do so is currently terrible.
This happened after the touch bar MBP was released; a lot of people made the switch then. Did that count for nothing in the end?
This requires Windows to become likeable.
I (and plenty of other people) will like Windows once it:
* has a consistent UI instead of 3 control panels with icons and UI paradigms ranging from Windows 95 to Windows 10.
* ships with quality applications that don't try to eat the entire screen to display 2 lines of text (pretty much all "modern" built-in apps are a disaster in that regard)
* has an App Store with decent, curated apps. Now I'm not sure if stores are the future on desktops, but Apple at least seems to be able to keep the crap at bay and actually have some decent productivity apps in it. Windows Store? Oh yeah, knockoff Flash Players and similar scams, and near zero apps you'd actually want to pay for.
* doesn't come with ads nor invasive telemetry that sometimes re-enables itself after updates (don't mention the Enterprise edition which you can only get in volume, so no solution for freelancers & small businesses)
* doesn't force a stupid phone-style lockscreen on non-touchscreen machines (I'm sure you can disable it with a Group Policy or registry tweak - my point being, I shouldn't have to spend hours doing that - macOS comes with reasonably sane defaults in comparison)
* has a start-menu search that actually works and doesn't surface irrelevant crap from their failed attempt at a search engine.
* has a calculator that doesn't take 10 seconds to load and then asks me to "rate" it (seriously? can't believe I'm saying this)
* proper QA - since Windows 10 the quality has gone down the drain and it feels more like a half-assed Linux distribution except that it has ads and you still pay for it
MacBooks definitely have their flaws, but overall it's still worth it and I write off their price to the cost of doing business (even if I had to buy a new MacBook every few months it would still be worth it for me). Microsoft (and their OEMs) can have my business once they put out a decent OS that actually feels polished and works for me, not against me. They managed to do it with Windows 7, not reason they couldn't do it again.
Still, for me personally the software lead macOS has over windows had shrunk far enough a few years ago that I opted for a thinkpad over a macbook pro. I love that thinkpad, it's an excellent machine. YMMV.
I agree with your larger point and most of your bullet points, but just as an FYI to anyone that's looking into Enterprise edition: you can get Enterprise licenses in small volumes.
Because of various data security clauses in some of our contracts, and MS's refusal to discuss issues like HIPAA compliance with respect to telemetry, I looked into getting Enterprise for our small business and found that there are resellers (I have experience with CDW and mychoicesoftware.com) that will provide small numbers of licenses -- in fact, I started with one license with each provider. Right now we have 2 licenses through mychoice and 4 licenses with CDW.
It's a pain in the ass because it's a subscription service and you're dealing with two parties for support (the reseller and MS) but it is doable.
This is one of the few places where their miserable App Store can make a difference, and yet they don’t even use it.
Windows never has shipped with a lot of built-in apps.
Calc used to start slow, not an issue anymore. It is also open source now and seeing more and more features being added to it.
> * has an App Store with decent, curated apps.
The app store has a much better selection, heck I installed Inkscape from it the other day!
Part of the problem is the Windows 3rd party consumer app scene died off when Mobile came around, and on top of that a lot of small utilities that are commercial on Mac have always been free on Windows, so the expectation of paying for smaller apps never was there.
The amount of creative apps available though, wow. Having a lot of pen first devices means there is a flood of apps using ink. The ecosystem there really impresses me.
But honestly? The number of 3rd party paid apps I am running that would be "app store appropriate" is number at 1 right now, and I have a fair number of third party apps running in the background to customize my machine.
The top Windows software consists of either large productivity apps (Adobe), free as in beer apps (Spotify) or free as in speech apps (Notepad++)
> * doesn't force a stupid phone-style lockscreen on non-touchscreen machines
I actually had a chat with the developers in charge of the lock screen. I honestly forget what it is doing, but I remember that the initial screen being shown is actually there for some good technical reason.
Also you can just hit any key on the keyboard to dismiss it. By the time my monitor has turned on it is gone.
> * has a start-menu search that actually works and doesn't surface irrelevant crap from their failed attempt at a search engine.
I've ranted about the start menu for years. Often times on this very site.
It, honestly, doesn't suck anymore. Except for on my ~8 year old Desktop that was upgraded from 7->8->10, with a number of insider/beta builds along the way. That machine has distinct issues with its video drivers and explorer loves crashing every few minutes making the start menu a no go. Having
But hey, dev machine, console is all I need anyway.
> * proper QA - since Windows 10 the quality has gone down the drain and it feels more like a half-assed Linux distribution except that it has ads and you still pay for it
Agree. Except, outside of candy crush (wtf MS), I haven't seen any ads.
My Mac keeps asking me to sign me up for a bunch of paid cloud services though. That is annoying. I can come up with a list of complaints about MacOS just as long as your list of complaints about Windows. And I've had Linux package managers run update and leave me with an unbootable system. (Hasn't happened for quite a few years now though, so fingers crossed and all that!). I guess that is one more thing Windows and Linux have in common now days. :|
As for MacBooks vs Windows, well, lots of Windows laptops have a superior keyboard, better specs, and the advantage of not paying an arm and a leg for proper RAM or a good sized SSD. Mac's do have those nice trackpads.
tl;dr everything is garbage quality has gone downhill, get off my lawn, someone please re-hire all the testers that got laid off years ago from apparently every tech company in the world.
But the ones it did ship with were pleasant to look at and were actually designed to get work done, not waste space (see Vista’s Windows Mail, Windows Fax & Scan, Windows Media Player, or even the legacy Control Panel).
Now it feels like the developers were given the task to fill up the entire screen, but no budget remained when it was time to actually develop features, so they increased font size & padding on the very little they had developed and called it a day.
> Calc used to start slow, not an issue anymore. It is also open source now and seeing more and more features being added to it.
It’s still the “new” calc which has the overhead of their awful UWP platform. I mean UWP makes sense for some stuff but a calculator? What was wrong with the legacy calc.exe? Not to mention the new calc has telemetry (yes, in a calculator, you heard me right) and they rejected the PR which removed it.
> free as in beer apps (Spotify) or free as in speech apps (Notepad++)
Seems like a perfect fit for the Store? They could have a team that reaches out to freeware/open source developers and packages their apps for the Store. If anything, that would help offset the amount of garbage that’s currently in there.
> I remember that the initial screen being shown is actually there for some good technical reason.
Mac and Linux (using LightDM) don’t seem to have that reason, so whatever it is, it’s more about laziness (not wanting to work around the supposed limitation)... oh and the fact they can use the lock screen to shill their sad search engine and/or ads.
> It, honestly, doesn't suck anymore.
Is the start menu fast? That’s another thing I noticed compared to Windows 7, the start menu on 10 has a slight delay while it was instant on Windows 7. That’s another issue when you’re used to pressing the Windows key and then typing whatever app you wanted.
> My Mac keeps asking me to sign me up for a bunch of paid cloud services though. That is annoying.
Haven’t noticed them myself (I am logged into my - free on the 5GB tier - iCloud account so maybe that’s why) but I heard Windows 10 trying to push OneDrive & Office 365... oh and I think they also try to push their browser if you attempted to install a third-party one.
> I've had Linux package managers run update and leave me with an unbootable system
Not surprising, but then again I’m not bitching about Linux (and nobody should) because it is free. However, when a paid, commercial OS like Windows 10 falls down to the same standard as Linux distributions (built by enthusiasts in their free time) you’ve gotta start asking questions.
Agreed about the hardware choices, but personally I’ve never felt the need for top of the line hardware anymore - my 12” MacBook (with dual core CPU and 8GB of RAM) is sufficient for my development work. In the rare cases I need to do CPU-intensive stuff (like compiling OpenWrt the other day) I get a beefy machine off a cloud provider and build it there - still more pleasant than dealing with Windows or Linux full-time.
It’s hard to weigh the Mac ecosystem heavily when it’s obvious that it is a dead man walking platform. How Apple handles the iTunes transition will be the turning point.
Knock on Windows, but it is a living platform that Microsoft is investing in. We all laughed at Windows 8 and Surface, but if you’re still laughing now, it’s because you haven’t looked.
It's more like, I'd rather pay another sum (assuming I have it), than have to suffer the experience of Windows or desktop Linux (and I've used all three for decades -- in fact professionally, it's all Linux work).
But of course, I'd rather didn't have to pay for a broken keyboard fix, or suffer the broken keyboard. But the experience on the other side is so much worse to me, that it still trumps that (possibly because I can afford it, although just barely -- I've resorted to using external keyboards with my 2017 MBPr).
The "ecosystem" (e.g. I'll lose my paid apps, or such, is a non-factor for me).
Wow, I felt like I was using a phone that was 5 years old.
I only imagine Apple users have Allegory of the Cave effect, they don't know whats out there. Leaving the cave is lots of work, so they enjoy whats available for them.
Your comment is offensively patronising. Have you considered the chance you’re also suffering from bias of having used the same systems for years?
>Apple's podcast app was glitchy/laggy.
>Apple maps took me a 'long' way, but it didn't know traffic was bad. I give them a 50% pass.
>Apple maps telling you to turn at the last second...
>The home screen is not on the same level as Android, no widgets in 2019.
>Controls, I felt like things werent intuitive, but thats an opinion thing.
>Updates, oh my god, it seemed like every day I needed to update, and every time I needed to sign in, and enter password
>I didn't like the animations, they took too long. Maybe I could have turned them off.
I can't think of anything else about the iphone product, so I'll let everyone tell me these are 'features' that are great.
Then there is an entirely different list about Apple being 'evil', being anti-competitive, closed, hackable, anti-consumer, poor treatment of workers, etc.. I consider working and buying products from 'evil' companies bad capitalism. I don't see them doing anything to remedy these.
Frequent updates seems to be a good thing. I don't update myself often, and my phone complains may be once a week or month, definitely not every day.
My OG pixel is a clear upgrade.
I don't really want to bash on people using Android. It's free OS after all and that's awesome, it allows many things that are not possible with iOS. But not everyone does not know what's out there. It's not like Android is some hidden treasure, it's everywhere and most people saw it, they just made a different choice.
You didn't post any in your comment.
Here are some random ones:
* When I have to enter pin (6 digits) I must press "OK". iPhone unlocks after 6-th digit automatically.
* It seems that Android app developers prefer the ad model. I don't have a single app on iOS with ads. Yet it's hard to find a single app in Android without ads. And I hate them.
* I spent something like 30 minutes trying to add a second phone number to my own android contact. I did not succeed. Theoretically I have to go to Google profile and add it there. But that button was not there. With iOS me is just another contact that I can edit as any other contact.
* To turn off all radios (airplane mode) I have to swipe from top, then swipe again to uncover the full menu, then swipe again to go to the right menu and only there I can click to enable airplane mode. With iOS it's one swipe and one click. I guess that I can customize this screen with Android and I can't with iOS... I don't want to bother, actually.
* I hate back button philosophy. I don't want to switch to other apps with back button. I prefer back buttons in app UI.
* I can't tap top bar to scroll to the top. Some websites provide that button as part of their UI, so may be it's just an iOS habit.
So Apple leaks the length of your password, Android does not. Okay.
> I don't have a single app on iOS with ads.
I don't have a single app on my Android with Ads. I pay for my apps to support the developers, otherwise I could easily add a hosts file or firewall to block ads in apps. I'm not an iOS user, so I don't know if a local hosts/firewall is possible with iOS.
> I spent something like 30 minutes trying to add a second phone number to my own android contact.
PEBKAC. I found it super easy. If I'm reading your comment correctly, you had to create two contacts for yourself just to have two phone numbers for yourself in iOS!?
> To turn off all radios
It's one swipe for Android too...
Your last two issues are just personal preferences.
EDIT: I had a pre-Retina A1278 mid-2012 MBP with 16 GiB and 2 SSD's for a long time. MagSafe 1, okay keyboard, generally bulletproof for a while until the external ports and logic board traces started corroding from humidity and temperature extremes. :( I bought a broken screen MBP for $170 USD to get a working logic board cheap to recover and migrate off. Donated to a sane-but-poor itinerant writer/journalist/commercial fisherman.
Powerful CPU. Upgradeable RAM/SSD.
Keyboard is nice, trackpad isn’t that great, screen isn’t as nice. Plus you’re stuck with Windows or Linux.
i finally pawned it off on someone else and they promptly fried the motherboard due to water damage(the air intake ports lead directly to the motherboard so good luck to any starbucks warriors out there) so that got replaced too.
Ship of theseus in action - a macbook story. only the bottom baseplate is from the original macbook at this point.
It's kind of sad that Apple gets away with just focusing on the glitzy externals - and that their plethora customers don't care.
And not sure if you've looked around your particular city but most people are using wireless headphones these days.
It's more like cost cutting / engineering laziness dressed up as being progressive.
I shall certainly be wary when I do get around to upgrading this one. Lenovo Australia are pretty easy to deal with though, fortunately.
Try that with a Coke or fancy Starbucks drink and you'll have sticky residue that requires you to replace the keyboard or clean it very, very thouroughly.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202179
Must have had the unit deeply submerged in water to get it in via those ports. Be interesting to know how that would've happened.
To be honest, I'm quite giggly over this whole ordeal.
Oh come on, this is getting really old. A lot of people (most Mac users that I know) pay the 40% premium because they want macOS and the Mac application ecosystem. Sure, there are people that will buy it as a status symbol, but that's a crude over-generalization.
Also, a Surface with about the same specs sells at about the same price at our local retailer. The Surface Laptop 2 with a Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD is 1449 Euro, the MacBook Air 1409. There are some differences like a touch screen (Surface), Touch ID (MacBook), higher PPI (MacBook). But for all practical purposes, they are in the same class and have the same price. A similarly spec'ed Dell XPS goes for 1399 Euro without a HiDPI screen.
Those are two quite modestly-spec'd laptops with fairly high price tags. I bought a rebranded Clevo with pre-installed Ubuntu 4 years ago with an i7 and 16GB of RAM for around $1,000. Does it have cool features like an all-aluminium construction or a nifty touch-bar? No, but it's a highly functional machine and has been quite reliable as a daily workstation (I once dropped it from a second-floor balcony and didn't have to visit a "Genius" since I'm actually allowed to open it and work on it myself).
Not so great at impressing peers, perhaps; however, I can eat all the sandwiches I want over my keyboard and it still works.
Sure. I am just saying that there is no big markup for Apple compared to other vendors. If you want a laptop with the same specs, screen, trackpad, weight, and thinness as a MacBook Air, you are going to end up in the same price class as a MacBook Air.
I am not arguing for thin laptops, light laptops, Magic Trackpads, or whatever. Different people have different requirements. But a lot of people buy MacBooks based on their requirements and not for status.
I think there is at least one thing that we can agree on: the Touch Bar is completely unnecessary and a gimmick ;).
Most Mac users are just happy to pay more for a device that isn't perfect but works far better than Windows and Linux.
If I wasn't worried about bricking it and all the config tweaks needed to get things like sleep and power management to work, I'd throw linux on the air and call it a day.
There is also the P1, which comes with a Xeon (!) option and Quadro P1000 graphics. The market for the P1 is pretty specific, but if you need those nVidia certified drivers, this is the one.
Edit: obviously you wouldn't run Linux on the P1 if you bought it for the certified drivers. It would still work though.
Been a big fan of the thinkpads for 20 years. All of them very solid machines that just last and last, and never had a problem with running Linux on them
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/Thi...
One of the requirements I had was that I can use the single cable USB-C 'docking' stations we have at the office, like my colleagues do who are on the new macbooks.
The great thing of the X1 is (imo) that is has USB-C with TB3 and charging capability like the Mac, but it also has 2 USB type A inputs.
That said, charging over USB-C is not ideal, the supplied 100W Lenovo power brick (unfortunately with proprietary connector) will charge the laptop much faster. It wouldn't even surprise me if the laptop actually loses charge under high load when connected to a USB-C charger. My current MBP also does that with a 60W charger connected.
Honestly I'd rather just have a desktop at this point. But I don't get to decide what hardware I use.
I had several issues with the arrow keys on the X1 Yoga 1st edition.
Tactile feedback while pressing but without actual keypress action on the up arrow. We had a lot of 15 of those, and the issue was present on 8 of these.
3rd edition now has the same issue on the left/right touchpad buttons (the physical ones). If you press don't press on the dead center of these keys, you feel the physical feedback, but there's no keypress action. Again, we got a batch of 15 of those, out of which 10 had this issue.
For the 1st edition the shape of the key was the issue (slant on the membrane), while for the 3rd the key is just too soft (plastic bends before pushing on the membrane).
This is the most brutal behavior a button can have. What's the point of physical feedback if it's broken?
The monitor backlight on all the X1 laptops we have (we're using them since 5 years) developed bright spots. The black level of the screen degrades pretty quickly too, settling after 3 months of normal usage. If you turn on a "fresh" X1 it has significantly more contrast than what you'll typically get a few months on.
Overall, it's still a great line (up and beyond than the HP "elitebook" series), but the keyboard and button issues are really irking me up and the Yoga 3rd edition IMHO has a worse keyboard then the 1st overall.
I sadly cannot compare with the XPS series as I never used the series long enough to judge.
I also live on my macbook so it's constantly in use, and much to my displeasure, around food.
Within my family, everyone that has a newer MacBook Pro has had keyboard issues.
I bought a used Lenovo X1 off ebay for $300 and that has become my daily driver, despite getting the keyboard repaired on my MBP. It doesn't get close to the same battery life as my MBP, and waking from sleep is a little iffy sometimes, but in terms of reliability and usability it far exceeds my experience with the MBP.
Second problem is that it will cost a lot of money to fix your keyboard out of warranty.
They’ll be fine for use with external keyboards, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone buy a used one for use as a regular laptop.
But one day it just happened. Nothing to provoke it--hadn't been eating over it, hadn't been treating it any rougher than usual. E key started bouncing (repeating). Rarely at first, but it got worse over the course of a week. Canned air didn't fix it--had to ship it out.
I can't really say it was a bad experience, though. They handled everything without issue. I walked into the store--no appointment--and they took a look at it immediately. I didn't pay anything despite being out of warranty and without AppleCare. Had it back in my hands a few days later.
Personally, I love the feel of Apple's butterfly keys. I like the short travel distance and the satisfying "click" they make. I've had plenty of similar issues with scissor switch keyboards; it's just that they're easier to repair. Pop off the key, give it a good blow, and it's as good as new, though you might end up inhaling some ancient crumbs in the process. Allegedly, that usually doesn't work with butterfly keys, for whatever reason, and they're hard to remove without breaking.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/macbook-keyboard-apple-apolo...
Just another clickbait title.
Reliability issues are a problem, but that's all within reason I think. If they repair for free.
The issue with Mac is they are too expensive and a lot of the regular, non-iPhone stuff is languishing.
No, when your product doesnt work, that is unacceptable.
Consider your statement as it would apply to cars for example: they are in constant need of repair, tweaking, maintenance.
Butterfly keyboards have never been a problem for me, the issue is really the rate of problems, how they are fixed, who pays for it.
This is engineering, having something fail is not acceptable.
No. Engineering is not about 'zero failure' at all. It's about characterizing the failure properly.
Have you ever had the pleasure of working on a physical, manufactured product? There is no such thing as a perfect run. There are always defects, there are always failures for any product at scale.
100% of Apple products have a measurable failure rate.
The only Eng. problem where we shoot for 0 failures are a) Space Systems and b) Nuclear tech. Maybe some other things.
But even in Space and Nuclear ... there's still a tolerance!
We launch people into space with some kind of estimate as to the likelihood they will all die.
Not meeting specifications.
These did not meet specs. At least customer expectations.
The other two being:
- the touch strip, which I find mostly annoying. I'd prefer physical buttons with the ability to show different labels (a la Optimus keyboard).
- whichever idiot thought putting the power plug at the bottom of the Magic Mouse was a good idea.
And then it gets dropped...
I wonder if the poor hardware has to do with increasingly outsourced R&D. I mean, everyone at Apple is rich, why should they bother with all the hard details ...
Exactly. And my life improved so much since I reduced the backpack carrying my laptop by 1mm...
Arrow keys being disabled in Safari iOS
3D Touch
Removing the 3.5mm Jack...
You plug the Pencil into the iPad to pair it. It comes with an adapter that you use to charge it with a regular cable.
"To charge your Apple Pencil (1st generation), plug your Apple Pencil INTO THE Lightning connector on your iPad. You can ALSO charge it with a USB Power Adapter by using the Apple Pencil Charging Adapter that came with your Apple Pencil. "
(Emphasis mine).
Besides, you shouldn't need to plug it that way to pair it either.
> Besides, you shouldn't need to plug it that way to pair it either.
Agreed. And glad that's not necessary for the latest generation.
You said "You plug the Pencil into the iPad to pair it. It comes with an adapter that you use to charge it with a regular cable."
As a response to the parent, your comment makes sense only if you meant to imply: "you're not supposed to plug it to charge it, only to pair it".
But if you meant to imply that as the right way to do things as according to Apple, you're wrong.
Apple suggests to plug it to the iPad to charge it (not just to pair it), and mentions the charge cable only as something you can "also" do.
In other words, Apple doesn't say you're just meant to "plug the Pencil into the iPad" only to pair it, and not only it doesn't discourage users to charge by plugging to the iPad, it suggests it.
In one way there's a single step.
In the other way, there's 2 steps and it involves another piece of equipment.
How might you write the documentation on how to do that thing?
Personally, I'd go with two sentences. The first that describes how to do the thing in one step. The latter, how to also do it in two steps and with another piece of equipment. I'm genuinely curious, is there a better way to approach that?
That's my whole argument. That Apple presents it as 2 different equally good ways to achieve the same end result (and even mentions the pencil-protruding-dangerously way first and the second way as an aside).
In case you've lost context, I made the point to answer the parent commenter, who said that "the pencil-protruding-dangerously" is not a problem, because you're meant to charge the Pencil the cable-extension way in the first place (and sticking it directly to the iPad is just needed once at first to "pair it").
Well, my point is, if that's "how you're meant" to do it, (a) nobody told Apple, (b) Apple themselves suggested this fact to no one, and in fact went on to recommend the "just stick it" way as (a) equally good as the other, (b) first.
>Personally, I'd go with two sentences.
This is only OK if you assume both ways are equally safe and good. Which is my whole point: that Apple assumes that, and presents them as such -- when in fact they are not.
As for how I'd do it: "You can charge your Pencil with the provided cable adapter. In an immediate need, you can also just stick it on your iPad, but be careful, it's a brain damaged way, and it's easy to snap the egde that way".
I still don't agree that it's a particularly dangerous method of charging the device [1]. But I get that you'd change the wording since you feel it's dangerous.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE9hHO4hM0c
- removed the SCSI port
- removed the floppy disk drive
- removed the CD ROM
It hurt EVERY time. The pain does not get less when they do it over and over again.
Guess which one apple (and everyone else) is using despite this being available for two years? (Not aptX) Wireless just isn't ready yet.
It's the Lightning connector which was never designed to be moved within the socket tens of thousands of times a day.
Plugs not being able to stand up the stress and strain were never Apple's concern.
Apple cables (for lighting, charing MBPs, etc) have easily strained since time immemorial.
I am consistently annoyed when Apple, who has the magnetic charging plug patent until 2025, refuses to use it in exactly the applications where it would be most beneficial.
For those not familiar with the Apple Mouse, the commenter means that the power plug is on the part that you’re supposed to have on the mousepad, meaning you can’t charge it while using it, at all.
Easily the worst way to design a mouse, ever. I don’t understand how it was approved.
I take it you've never used it before.
"To charge your Apple Pencil (1st generation), PLUG YOUR Apple Pencil INTO THE Lightning connector ON YOUR iPad. You can ALSO charge it with a USB Power Adapter by using the Apple Pencil Charging Adapter that came with your Apple Pencil." Emphasis mine.
Apple not only designed this BS way to charge, but also promoted it as the canonical way on their official docs (even on their videos).
I could just paste the whole excerpt, but I wanted to "rub the relevant part "in the face", so to speak.
I take it you are familiar with the concept of adding emphasis to a statement to highlight some part, right?
If you're asking for the specific use of caps, it's because italics don't look very well in HN, and I can't bold IIRC.
It was just a terrible idea, no excuses. Requiring a dongle only adds insult to injury.
Just think, when your Pencil plug end snaps, because it was protruding from the end of the iPad and you've dropped it, or hit something, or made a sudden move, etc, how convenient would that be?
It's a bad design, end of story.
Personally I don't like moving from Lightning to a more-proprietary non-standard magnetic interface. I think the first generation Pencil has a much better design in this regard, since now we have it working with the standard iPad and iPad Air.
But, I think the design of the first generation Pencil is pretty good, so I'm curious of your thoughts since you find it to be a bad design.
Yeah, very much so. Both the charging and also the better grip.
>Personally I don't like moving from Lightning to a more-proprietary non-standard magnetic interface.
That's a non issue with the Apple Pencil, because it's already a proprietary product itself, inherently tied to the iPad. It's not like it's a cross-product/cross-platform device, and needs a standard charging interface. You'll need an iPad to use it in the first place, so might as well charge it with one.
It _is_ cross product insofar as it's on the iPad, iPad Air, and iPad Pro. This is pretty useful for me and my partner since we can simply share a single Pencil since neither of us rely too much on it. But that's just an exception case, I'm sure.
Lightning is proprietary, but very common. I've got a half dozen Lightning cables lying around. If I want to pair the Pencil to a new device, I simply plug it into the Lightning interface and it's ready to go.
I was trying to think of a better phrase than what I used "more-proprietary", since both are at 100% proprietary that doesn't come across how I intend.
Basically I strongly dislike these weird interfaces that we're putting on the iPad -- the one for the keyboard wasn't great, and the addition of the one for the Pencil also doesn't feel great. But, if that's the direction that best serves the function provided then I suppose it's fine. My hope then is that we get those to move down to the lower-end devices (as we've seen with the Air getting the keyboard cover).
Pencil 1's terrible, though. It's led to many a "oh I could use my Pencil for this... oh it's dead, yet again. I'll just charge it... but I want to keep using my ipad, so where's the pinkie-nail-sized adapter again? Eh, screw it, I'll do something else."
[EDIT] also, when's it done? Dunno. Oh and the tiny adapter is directional, though either side kinda fits whichever way you put it, but I guess putting an arrow on it or making the ends different colors wouldn't have been "beautiful" so there's a little getting-it-right ritual every time. Get it wrong and it won't charge. Which, again, any little LED indicator of charging status would've solved that problem, too.
This is another example of sound engineering taking a back seat to user-facing design.
Instead of a fully removable cap, I would have used a tether to keep it secured to the device, and the connector would be on a short cord with a 90-degree connector. A removable clip would then secure the device to the edge of the pad as it charges. Otherwise the whole thing could flop around without damage to the male connector or female socket. Though this is all with the benefit of hindsight, everyone ought to know better than to plug anything into anything else without some strain relief.
Same with the pencil 1st gen - it charged so fast that it having a male port actually made sense as it made on the go charging feasible.
That's a minute longer than you should have to wait to keep using your mouse. I can appreciate that they minimized the impact of the poor design, but that doesn't mean it's not a poor design.
> This resulted in them actually using it as a wireless mouse instead of a wired one.
Does that improve functionality at all? It sounds like the same style-over-substance design that's led Apple to sacrifice important functionality for unnecessary size/weight cuts in the last few years.
Putting it on the bottom did nothing but remove that optionality for the user, and that can be really frustrating.
Unless the reason it charged so quickly was because it connected to the bottom of the mouse, I don't see the justification.
It is my work mouse for 99% of my working time, and as a very heavy user of it I love the mouse, and it just isn't something that enters my mindspace at all.
I feel like this conversation is one half people who have and use the mouse, and who have no problem with it, and one half people who don't use the mouse and imagine that it's some critical issue that they would face daily. And the latter are busy down arrowing anyone who isn't outraged about a non-issue.
My mouse is wireless. When it says battery low you know what I do? I plug it in and it looks just like a wired mouse for an hour.
Tell me what exactly you get in exchange for losing that feature? Sexiness?
Could they put the port somewhere else? Not with the current design (and it's a design that works spectacularly well for flicking and scrolling with fingers on the touch surface -- it seems to be a bit more than a design for looks). Well I suppose they could put it on the left or the right, but that would be stupid. They can't fit it on the ends. So they should have designed it for a non-issue that users of the mouse have no trouble with?
An hour? A 2 minute charge will run a Magic Mouse for a full work day.
I agree that it's a very ridiculous placement, but do you have a better idea where it should be placed? IMO, this is the best option given the constraints.
The usual ridicule is that you can't use it when it's charging. To me, it's a non-issue at all:
- When the battery drops to a low level (4% I think?), you will see a notification on your device reminding you that the charge is low. So have never been caught in a situation where I needed to charge the mouse while using it. - The battery lasts a long time. Apple claims that it lasts 2 months per full charge. Based on anecdotal evidence from myself and a friend, it lasts 3 months per full charge. So this 2 months claim isn't based on some super unrealistic assumption that Apple makes. So why is this important? Because at 4% when you receive the warning notification, the mouse can still run for another 2 days! (Assuming constant usage everyday and one full charge lasts 60 days, then 4% = 60 / 100 * 4 = 2.4.) - Finally, it charges super fast, too. A couple of minutes of charges can run a full day. So if you come to the office to find your mouse out of charge (because you forgot to charge it for the past 2 days despite the notifications), then plug it in before you get your coffee and you're good to go.
My point is that, yes, the charging port placement is ridiculous, but 1) I don't think there are better options and 2) it's really not that big of a deal because it is extremely unlikely that you'd need to charge while you're using it.
How about having a small notch at the front of the mouse, like every other mouse I've used? It can then be simultaneously wired, and usable. Maybe you're right that it's usually not frustrating, but I was trying to use this mouse at my office once and it wasn't charged, and it seemed pointless to wait before using it.
> then plug it in before you get your coffee and you're good to go
What if I don't want to test my mouse before coffee? What if I have urgent emails to answer?
I understand that it isn't a world-breaking choice, but I don't understand why they would choose to change this. I love Apple, but this seems like one of those situations where a company changes something just to change it, claiming it's new and innovative, but actually reduces usability.
Plug it in once a month (when it's at ~50% or so) for an hour or two when you finish your day or go to lunch?
Is there any other context in which Apple would tolerate an avoidable two minutes of wait time? Definitely not for their web pages!
I use this mouse with my desktop PC. It's got a port in the front to connect via USB to charge while allowing the user to use the mouse. Furthermore it supports wireless charging.
I'm shocked Apple thought putting it at the bottom was a good design decision.
I do. It was on purpose. They do not want people using the wireless mouse as a wired mouse with a short, thick cord not designed for it. Which is totally what my parents would do.
Like this wouldn't invite even more outrage?
NeXT workstations never had function keys.
That's still stupid as hell, as it basically asserts you're not allowed to use your computer if your mouse is out of batteries.
Logitech's MX master came with a super long cable (it's at least 150cm / 5 ft), pretty flexible, and the charging port's at the top of the mouse. When it's out of battery it just becomes a wired mouse for a short while, it's super convenient. The Anywhere 2S is the same, and for all that I preferred the VX Nano overall, not having to hunt for a pair of emergency battery when I forget/forgot to recharge the 2S is extremely useful.
In fact that's pretty much the only thing I dislike about my Apple Wireless Keyboard: if I forget to charge/change the batteries when it starts whining it becomes dead weight.
The idea is you weren't supposed to leave it plugged in.
2 hours of charging = 2 months of use so it's not like charging was supposed to be a regular occurrence.
The idea is I don't care about the idea. If I forgot to charge it, or come back from holidays and it's off, I want to be able to plug in and still work.
Like with every other mouse.
Not to mention: when the charge lasts so long (2 months) it's even easier to forget to recharge it and take it for granted. Unlike something you need to charge e.g. daily or so, this is something that stays out of your mind for months on end -- until it fails.
As I mentioned elsewhere. You plug it in, go get a cup of coffee and come back with a day+ of usage.
And it's also completely different from removing a headphone jack – you could actually see that as a form of progress. But charging a mouse without being able to use it – try and convince me that is progress.
To me, it just reeks of laziness, just like the iPhone X "notch" and the Pencil gen 1 charging. In all these fairly recent examples, Apple basically gave up and didn't even bother trying.
Do you have one? It charges very quickly. Basically go make a cup of coffee and it's charged for the day+ when you get back. Leave it plugged in overnight and it's good for almost a month.
- Bluetooth seems to be fundamentally flawed at a hardware level. AirPods, Plantronics, doesn’t matter. It just randomly connects and disconnects as it pleases.
- USB-C dongles are a minefield of poor functionality
However, I’ve run Linux off and on since 2007 and Windows for 20+ years and I still wouldn’t give up macOS as my daily driver. Even with the issues above it still has an excellent display, I like the keyboard (waiting to start having issues), and the battery life is the best I’ve ever had.
I’m glad to hear desktop Linux works for some people, but I just don’t have time to a.) tune and configure it to work and have decent battery life with whatever hardware I choose or b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update.
I don't understand this.
I understand not liking Linux Desktop(I hate it, but LOVE LOVE LOVE Ubuntu Server, fav OS of all time)
And... the screen is what has you sold on Apple OS?
I'm flustered at this logic. Pretty screen-> Good operating system
I only imagine you use your laptop as a facebook machine. Would a cellphone do?
For me it's an issue of eye health.
I continue to prefer a screen where it has a high pixel density but is plenty usable without any scaling.
The alternative is that you spend 30 minutes of research and get a superior product cheaper.
This isnt an opinion, this is reality.
You can find a computer with better specs than Apple, cheaper. I'm not sympathetic to the 'mom' who doesn't know what RAM is, they get penalized by Apple for being an uninformed consumer.
Is there any reason for a 'Nerd' to pick Apple?
You are making a typical nerd assumption, which is to equate "better product" with "better specs".
Apple is very good at Marketing.
EDIT: Will someone explain what this theoretical 'non spec' thing that matters is? The Apple logo?
“But the replies are just canned crap you found on online forums from five years ago.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll fix it before it is public-facing.”
Oops, guess not.
That's hard to do, since you're being vague about the meaning of "specs".
How about this: you find an example of a non-Apple laptop that you think has "the same specs" or better as a 15-inch MBP, and I'll point out how it's different.
Mostly the OS. I don't cringe before plugging into an unfamiliar external display. The touchpad isn't so bad it makes me feel like I have to carry a mouse if I plan to use the device for any length of time. The built-in "office" suite of apps are my favorite I've used, anywhere. Preview is indispensable for working with PDFs—I've never even known PDFs to be more than barely tolerable to work with outside Apple's world. It's Unixy, so many of my preferred tools work natively on it. It has lots of built-in stuff that's less convenient or works less well on Linux (modifier key remapping, screen sharing, and more).
I've been around the block with Linux on the desktop. Around and around and around, in fact. I could tolerate Windows—not as a work OS, but for gaming, anyway—all the way from 3.1 to 8, but 10's aggressively unpleasant. Now MacOS is the only desktop OS that doesn't drive me to swear at it multiple times a day while using it. That's worth some money, when I have to use some OS just about 365 days a year.
Touchbar's beyond dumb and into "harms UX" territory, though. The keyboard two generations ago—on the fatter Macbooks that still had disc drives—is noticeably better than either since, and the butterfly keyboards are awful. Unfortunately every other option is so much worse that they can afford to screw up badly for years on end and I still can't bring myself to switch.
Then it breaks and you have to send it back for warranty and wait months until they repair it. Plastic breaks, etc. It's not that simple.
“Why would anyone ever buy a BMW, when you can get a Dodge Challenger with more horsepower for cheaper?”
EDIT: Specs are everything. Not just HP. Specs are how many USB ports the vehicle has. The colors of buttons. The comfort.
Also, I wasnt sure if you thought a BMW was actually better. They are lower rated, but BMW has a huge marketing presence in the US.
On the other hand, with this broad of a definition, no, there is no other computer on the market with the same "specs" as a Macbook Pro.
The touchpad has the advantage of being immediately intuitive, but after a little work on an old ThinkPad (an X220 from eBay is about $130 shipped) you’ll probably be able to appreciate both sides. I like how I don’t have to leave home row to do a little clicking around.
If you end up getting a machine of that era, maybe try this guide for my favorite OS, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370327
Our standard-issue work laptop is a thinkpad, and I find the trackpoint super annoying. It's good for quickly adjusting the cursor while typing (which you can do just fine using the keyboard), but awful for moving long distances or scrolling (lack of inertial scrolling).
Easy access to up-to-date tooling through brew: zsh, docker, bash, vim et al.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Linux only user since the 90’s and for many years used the dell xps developer edition.
But, the mac touchpad (I know, I’m doing it wrong) and screen coupled with superior battery time as well as solid sleep/wakeup makes for a great experience.
The new air, without the ridiculous touchbar and updated keyboard is actually pretty great.
One nerds ¢2.
Whether the tools are “unixy” is of course an interesting discussion. :p
I guess my line of thought was: kind of “unix” -> kind of “posix” -> kind of compatible with a lot of your familiar tooling.
All this equals pretty good platform for many nerds.
I could have made myself more clear.
Macos can use the xhyve hypervisor (bhyve port) which again points to “unixy” roots — it runs freebsd for example.
Through the years I spent quite some time hacking about to get bsd running on other hypervisors, and for the longest of time it was just a hassle with abysmal performance (vmware esx, xen/xenserver).
Docker on osx is by the way completely seamless from a UX perspective.
As a mobile/laptop dev experience I still think the new air is great. ;)
macOS is its own thing, where some functionality is provided by some very old versions of BSD tools. But using it feels pretty different from using a modern BSD variant.
That all changed when Dell started selling versions of their laptops with Linux pre-installed. And it didn't change a little bit either, in many cases it was a complete reversal. Drivers got released on Linux _before_ Windows - in particular Intel video drivers were repeatedly released on Linux before Windows in my case.
I presume that's developers are moving to Linux now. That was driven home to me just now when reading the Bling Fire post here, learning Bling Fire is an internal library used by MS's Bing search engine - then noticing all the instructions had a very nix'y feel, and the benchmark environment was Ubuntu.
(1) Unibody metal construction
(2) Extremely high-quality and high-resolution screen
(3) All-SSD storage
(4) High-quality trackpad with multi-touch gesture support (all gestures must work perfectly 100% of the time, and the acceleration/deceleration should feel physically natural)
(5) Unix-like operating system pre-installed out of the box (no having to set it up myself) and fully supported. (Doesn’t have to be macOS. Ubuntu or FreeBSD would be fine).
In any case, the Huawei Matebook pro x would seem to fit all but the default unix OS requirement.
I dont think any PC comes with any unix os by default, other than apple, but given the ease of setup I'm not inclined to view that requirement as anything other than a way to select what you wanted a first
If I could be guaranteed that everything work perfectly out of the box with no weird driver issues when I burn and install an Ubuntu .ISO, I agree that the OS being default is not a necessity.
But I've only heard of this being the case on a small whitelist of "known to work well with Linux" devices, like Thinkpads, etc., which don't fulfill the other conditions.
Again, I'm not just arguing ideology, here: I'd be genuinely happy for you to show me a non-Apple laptop that meets my criteria, if one exists.
This has been my experience with Windows machines, interestingly. On the other hand, if my Mac makes fan noise I know exactly what caused it and it's going to be a compile job I kicked off, not some random driver spinning out of control in the background…
Because they are so cost sensitive, Windows laptop makers build SKUs based on the hardware that’s available and cheap. So maybe you get a great display, but there was a good deal on crappy touchpads. Or you get a lottery where the same laptop can come with screens of widely varying quality (Toms hardware just did a piece about this with respect to Lenovo).
My Windows laptop purchase recently went like this. I was looking for a replacement for my 2012 MacBook Pro Retina 15”. Dell was out because of coil whine (which has been a problem with Dell machines since I owned an XPS 15 17 years ago). I stare at text all day so a high-DPI display is clutch. But almost every PC vendor make you choose between 4K and 5 hours of battery life, or HD and 10 hours. No well balanced 3K display with 8-10 hours like Apple has. (Again, this is because they’re stuck with what the hardware manufacturers are offering, they don’t have the clout and margins to demand custom panels.) Same thing with Lenovo’s 15” laptop options (they do have a 3K 15” display but it’s quite dim). HP didn’t have Precision touchpads. The Surface machines I’ve owned have been a Q&A disaster (it took them how long to get connected standby working?) And the 15” Surface Book is too much fiddily convertible tablet shit I’d never use. I ended up with an X1 Carbon, which was a bit of a compromise because I wanted a 15” screen. But it ticked the boxes of good screen (WQHD), good battery life, etc. It took a lot more than 30 minutes, and in the end I didn’t get exactly what I was looking for.
Even then it wasn’t sunshine and rainbows. Lenovo has awful quality control. I had to reinstall the Os to get rid of Lenovo crap-ware (and gained 2 hours of battery life in the process). I got a few dead pixels within 6 months. They replaced the screen, but now the bezel is peeling (it is just a fucking sticker, on a laptop that’s $1,500 even heavily discounted). The fibocom WWAN module has never worked properly (like requires a reboot every day after getting disconnected). So the one paper advantage over an apple machine is a dud. (And again, it’s because Lenovo sources parts from whatever is on sale that day—the Sierra modules that come on other iterations of the X1C are great.)
I'll humor you.
dell.com * Choose between home or work → I'll go with work since it's for development * Choose between Latitude, Vostro, Inspiron, Precision, XPS, G Series, Chromebook, and Deals → I'll go with Precision as I'm a professional creator (whatever that means). * Choose between 3000 Series, 5000, or 7000 → I'll take 5000 for the performance * Choose 5520, 5530, or 2-in-1 5530 → umm I'll guess at 5530 because it's a little cheaper * Now it lists 4 actual models I could buy
The comparable mac is 11% more, but if you buy an Office license for Windows and can use Pages/Numbers on a Mac then the price is the same.
The real difference in my opinion is that Apple does a good job of directing you to the right machine, and you know that your purchase will be good. Whereas Dell and others offer a myriad of confusing options (e.g. Inspiron vs Vostro?) and some of those options will be complete crap.
I'm sure I could repeat the process and get a better deal elsewhere but it will certainly take me more than 30 minutes to find it. So, yeh, for price sensitive consumers you can optimize for price. Not all of us 'nerds' prioritize for price however. I work in an office with Dells, Thinkpads, Asus, etc. Some of those machines are complete duds, as well we are starting to cycle out 2 year old laptops because their specs when purchased were crap, while my 2015 mac still outperforms those.
You really don't have to do that. For example: I put Ubuntu Mate on a 2009 Macbook that could not run MacOs anymore (too slow). I had to install a wifi driver, and that was it. Everything else worked out of the box.
My current Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop is running the same OS, and needed 0 drivers installed.
I put Antergos on an Intel Nuc (that I later switched to Ubuntu Server). Again, no configuration, and no issues with drivers.
I will mention that Mate has some font scaling problems if you're running two monitors with different resolutions (spoiler: you can't), but I know that other distro's handle that just fine.
Unfun fact: although the Wi-Fi spec is backwards compatible, a lot of places only serve 802.11n and forward making legacy hardware impossible to use on their network.
Of course Windows is shit in this respect too these days. I got two extra hours of battery life from my X1 Carbon by wiping the disk and installing Windows LTSB. But even then I still have to police things, watching for driver updates or software installs that randomly leave some service running that keeps the CPU from sleeping. It’s like nobody tests these things.
The battery life on the X1 Carbon is about one and a half to two hours, which i think is acceptable given that the battery is reporting less than half of its original capacity.
I tend to go with older laptops, but they are definitely fast enough and I like how robust the experience is.
That's evidence that there exists something that Linux users recommend to people who complain about having battery problems on Linux, not evidence of widespread problems with Linux that require expertise to get the operating system to "work" at all.
What's really happening is perverse incentive structures. Ideally all energy use of every app would be accounted for and, somehow, relayed back to the original "responsible agent" (e.g. a signed app being responsible for all its subprocesses). This then needs to be tied to some valuation.. in an app store, you could say e.g. lower commission based on energy efficiency, or just a higher ranking score.
Currently, resource usage suffers from the tragedy of the commons, and it will remain that way until we fix the incentives.
OSX is starting on that road, as you can see with the Energy tab in activity monitor. I wonder if they will take further steps with it, but it's a good start. (You'd then want e.g. browsers to allow push the accounting down to invidual sites; now we're suddenly attacking death-by-JS as well.)
One day! But until that day, you are right: nobody tests those things. Why would they? Honestly, if you're creating drivers for something, worrying about energy use is... is so inconsequential it's borderline altruistic. Who will ever, really notice? It's basically charity work. That needs to change.
There are also orders of magnitude difference between a sleeping device and an idle device, and an idle device to a fully loaded device. We are talking three weeks to 20 hours to 35 minutes. And that gap will only continue to get larger
Actually you don't have to do that, which is not the same thing at all.
I find this one of the oddest moves of those who (for reasons mysterious to me) find OS's worthy of advocacy. When you say to them 'with Linux I find X', their response is "no you don't". Where is the conversation supposed to go from there?
I install a couple of distros on every new laptop I buy, and perhaps once again during its lifetime. I have in reality found it a tremendous pain and time-suck, with each attempt taking a few days reading and fiddling, more than in total I've spent 'administering' desktop OS X or Windows over a couple of decades.
I've persevered out of a combination of nostalgia (I did run Slackware full-time for some years), wistfulness about some gnu/linux goodies (i3 etc), and ethical preferences. But on every occasion I just find it to be more time than it's worth. I have many more important things to do with my precious and limited time on this planet than mess with OS's
Since most of my peripherals have a detachable cord, I just bought a couple of USB-C <-> whatever cables and now I'm fully 'native' USB-C. Suddenly the couple of USB-A host devices I have around feel incredibly legacy (an old MacBook, Xbox One).
> Bluetooth seems to be fundamentally flawed / USB-C dongles
I do have a USB-C-to-many-things hub but I never use it now, yet it should be noted that the thing is so badly shielded that it throws WiFi down the curb every single time I used to plug a device or even SD card into it, so it might affect bluetooth too. I have zero issues with the same devices but using USB-C cables.
Apparently, it is an issue due to the metal unibody. It took me way longer than I care to admit to figure out the usb stick was causing the problem. :-(
Fun fact: try gently swiping your finger over the unibody while charging, and then without charging. You'll feel something like a vibration in the former case.
I prefer quality plastic.
From my experience, troubleshooting macOS when it randomly decides to break is almost a Windows-like experience - lots of frustration and no sensible help on the internet (unless your problem is so trivial it gets solved by something like NVRAM reset, because this is the best advice you can count on online). I absolutely prefer GNU/Linux where, if something breaks, it's not that hard to get it back to sensible state.
If that doesn’t fix it, I’m going to format and restore with a backup. I have better things to do.
https://godarch.com
For Linux forums, there is a small contingent of this never happens to me on Linux Yggdrasil, so try that. Except instead of a distro that died 20+ years ago and will not be getting updates, they have some other distro nobody has ever heard of and may not be getting updates.
Even worse than answers.microsoft.com. Ok, almost. (Let's not be too harsh here.)
I agree that it's infuriating when it's something reasonable that you're trying to do, but I've experienced this in many tech forums, and programmers have been some of the worst offenders in this category for me in the past, actually.
I can afford such problems on my personal desktop, google the issues and spend a part of day fixing some poor QA release bugs, but not on a machine that I use and rely on for $ paying work.
> Interim releases will introduce new capabilities from Canonical and upstream open source projects, they serve as a proving ground for these new capabilities.
I know I'm in the minority here, since I do so much on the keyboard and don't use the mouse or the fancy trackpad features, but it's really infuriating.
Edit: I must be getting old, because I much prefer the ~2015 MB Airs: no touch bar, yes appropriately sized trackpad and magsafe.
The work-issued 2017 MBP I was using at the time is bit smaller and lighter but the bigger trackpad and brighter screen were not worth the downsides for a personal machine that I expect to use for at least five years.
Does anyone know the motivation for making them big and so close to the edge?
This is surprising and disappointing, because Apple's iPad (for example) still has excellent palm rejection.
Combining the awful butterfly keyboard with the disaster of a trackpad, it's really one of the least usable laptops Apple has ever produced.
The only thing that has worked for me is to use an external keyboard and trackpad. ;-(
So you are comparing a finely tuned OS for a specific hardware to using linux with whatever hardware you throw at it? Why don't you just pick a specific hardware that works with linux well e.g. thinkpads?
On both, I have the same awful problems with waking up the laptop after it went to sleep mode (when closing the lid). It will wake up at first, allow me to enter the password in the screen locker, then screen goes black and that’s it. Have to reboot then, losing all unsaved data. Google search shows, plenty of people out there with the same problem, but the only “solution” seems to be “oh, just disable screen locking”.
So if Thinkpads are the known-good choice for Linux... then I don’t want to know how it behaves on other laptops...
You can't, because Lenovo changes out the hardware randomly every year. Look at the long list of Linux problems with the latest X1 Carbon: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carb...
Literally all you have to do is install powertop.
> b.) troubleshoot it when it randomly decides to break itself on update.
I've been running Linux desktop for almost 2 years now and I've never had that happen. Unlike when I used Windows, where a W10 update would be forced into my system and either change functionality or fundamentally break something.
However, they are VERY easy to damage. And even if you get the key off without breaking it, the problem is the butterfly mechanism is very fragilse and goes 'flat', it's not so much getting dust specks in there.
I realized that this is what Apple lock-in means, and now I'm leaving their ecosystem. Whereas before I would tell friends and family to just get Apple products, now I'll them to buy a Chromebook or Windows laptop. Maybe this is why I keep seeing the newly released Macbook Air on sale for $200 off...
It's not entirely feasible, even with my minimal exposure. So I've compromised. My daily driver is a Darter by System76. The hardware is good enough, the battery life is good enough, the keyboard is fantastic, and Pop OS is beautiful. I still have my failing MBP, but it is demoted to a station for syncing my iPhone. I rarely touch it. When it dies I will replace it with a Mac Mini. I don't want to move to the Google ecosystem because of privacy issues.
Apple MacBooks lately are being priced on par with the competition. You want premium screen and trackpad - you will have to pay just as much for a windows laptop.
I used Macs for almost a decade, but I'm crazy happy with my Dell running Ubuntu 18.04. Amazing!
1. Not enough tactile feedback from keys. I have to carefully calibrate the amount of muscle power I use to hit the keys, which paradoxically increases the pain in the joints of my fingers.
2. Lack of a physical ESC key. I touch type, and this makes writing code rather difficult.
3. Lack of USB port. Lack of HDMI port. Lack of magnetic charging port (which is very convenient)
4. Oversized touchpad. Increases accidental touches.
My old MBP is now in its third year, and I'm really hoping a newer, more usable version will come out before it dies.
When the free keyboard replacement program shuts down, and Apple still denies the problem, and Apple happily charges you $795 every so often to fix their mistake over the life of the machine, will it be fraud?
Most people are best served with a good chromebook. That crowd won't be the ones frequenting this type website.
Apple Inc has a monopoly on regular users' hardware for their iOS/OS.
Windows, Linux, Android, Windows Phone OS (when that was a thing), did not. Companies were able to try and provide the best hardware in order to win customers.
Apple doesn't have provide the best hardware, regular users only have one hardware provider to choose from if they want Apple's iOS/OS.
(The average regular user is not going to make a Hackintosh.)
I have an iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AirPods and there is definitely a strong ecosystem there.
However, I ditched the MacBook (due to keyboard issues) and went with a ThinkPad and have been very happy. The ThinkPad has iTunes, so I dont lose my music. I supposed there is iCloud integration, but that seems like a small reason to remain on Apple desktops.
Side note: Other benefits of ThinkPad
- 64GB RAM! Can run multiple VMs easily - NVIDIA GPU for those who do CUDA work.