Context: this is a legit screenshot I took on my workplace around 1.5 years ago. Hopefully it's been patched by now? Completely ridiculous behavior
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Not to talk shit about Mac users, but in this day and age with how advanced technology is, you have to be insane to buy a Mac. What kills it for me is that nothing is upgradeable on the damn thing, like zero. If your internal drive dies, you're SOL. And if I got this correctly, they now have the bios OS on the same drive, the Internal. So, you won't even be able to get to your bios. You won't be able to install the OS on external hard drive in case you needed to. This is insane and I can never understand why anyone would buy into this shit.
Mac users, and actually most laptop users, don't give a shit about the things you mention. They buy it, use it for some 2-5 years, then sell it and get a new model. Upgrading hardware is way too complicated for most people. They don't know or care what a BIOS is. It comes with the OS installed and that's the only thing they would ever want. Turn it on, use Safari, outlook, and office 365, maybe some tool like Photoshop/Ableton/etc, that's it.
I mean iPhones are the same right? They lock down everything so it's idiot proof and they control the environment exactly so they can maximise the smoothness of the experience.
I have to use an apple phone for work and it's sorta annoying to use. Like sure it's fast and snappy but there's no back button and it isn't as intuitive as Apple users want you to believe it is.
The problem with Apple OSs is that Apple decides how you are suppose to use the device.
They decide that a phone/tablet/laptop is suppose to be used in a certain way and if you try to use them like a different computer form factor, you are left confused and frustrated.
I have been a long time user of Linux, Android, and Windows. I have no Apple devices and never will because every time I am forced to use one I can't figure out how to do the simplist things that is trivial on every other OS I have used. Not to mention they won't let you customize the device how you want to use it.
They do have a fantastic aesthetic and OS if you want a phone/tablet/laptop that does the simplist low-effort use, but I am always lost when trying do do anything outside of Apple's groove. They are all looks and no substance.
I have to use an iPad for work. I was also forced to use one of their phones as a while back. I have unhappily used the iOS system for about 7 years now.
A few additional things:
I have attempted to use multitasking on it. Every update changed it's behavior and they are all unintuitive. I gave up and use my phone for the second task.
The settings menu can burn in hell. It's an absolute hot mess that's worse than anything else I have seen.
I use a Bluetooth keyboard at times. In order to use it I have to leave an annoying floating "accessibility" circle on the screen when it's not connected. In order to turn it off, it's buried somewhere in the hellish settings menu.
Apps crash about 2x more often on it than on any other system I have used. Especially after an update before the inevitable small fix comes out a few weeks later.
The updates go through an endless cycle of adding bugs then killing bugs then adding new bugs. One of my favorites bug was when I had the phone years ago. They somehow broke the search functions in contacts and took them 4 months to fix it. My company had loaded 3,000 corporate contacts Into the phone... Fun times.
Then there are all the hidden gestures that are completely illogical. I turn gestures off on my android phone for a reason.
That f-ing settings menu. Want to change the settings of an app? You don't change it within the app like you'd expect (and is same), no, leave the app, go into the 'Settings' app, scroll around the unordered list of apps, find the one you want and change it there. Who the heck is that a sane way of changing settings??
It’s just what people are used to. I find a few stuff annoying when I use my android phone for work. Also, you can swipe left anywhere to go back. Didn’t feel the need for a button
Swiping can be hard for a 90 year old with arthritis or anyone with a lot of other physical disabilities. For all the work Apple has put into marketing the iPhone as the accessible option, I'd rather give great grandpa an android in 2023.
Lots of androids already have an accessibility setting to make things easier too. Gets rid of settings and lesser used options on screen, makes things nice and big and simplifies the UI so it has a few things that older people might want/use.
Ah good to know. Might need to look at the tutorial menus or something.
I half agree but the idea that Macs aren't as expressive or versatile as any other laptop is so antiquated now. More than half of the software engineering industry is using macs as primary machines.
Why? Because the software and hardware gets out of the fucking way and let's you focus on getting things done. I remember a time before Macs were the popular choice and I remember everyone spending 25% of their time fighting with drivers or obscure machine-specific software install or development build issues.
Even getting rid of the bloat is easy. Highlight apps, drag them to recycle bin, done. And as you said, a 3-5 year upgrade cycle makes the premium far less of an issue.
I certainly have family members that use Macs because they are tech illiterate, but that's further evidence of their versatility.
There's so much to shit on Apple for, but the myth of Macs being in some obscure home computer niche needs to die.
I've been using windows PCs for 25 years and struggle with the damn Mac at work. The usability of the thing is just utter garbage. Nothing is better but everything is different just... because. I've wasted so much time learning the fucking thing and still nothing just works.
Want to take a screenshot? Press 3 keys. You better remember them because it's the most random fuckery imaginable. You like the cut & paste shortcuts of windows? We've something similar except it doesn't work everywhere for some reason. This shit goes on and on.
I don't know why Apple hates a proper Taskbar. I miss it everytime I struggle to find one of my open applications. Which is always.
This is because you're stuck in a very specific mental model of computing, so using anything that isn't Windows will feel frustrating if you're unwilling to adapt.
I've been using Windows for 30 years this year (3.0 gang!) and building PCs for almost that long. I had a similar reaction to Linux when I first started using it. But I persisted and realized there were tasks I could perform faster and, importantly, with more safety on Linux than on Windows. So I stuck with it and now I use headless Linux almost as much as macOS and Windows
Also, if you've really gone full Pavlov on Windows modifier keys, you can remap cmd to Ctrl in system settings.
Linux isn't MacOS.
I'm not suggesting it is
I was complaining about MacOS and you brought up Linux for some reason. I am aware I can do anything on Linux I can on Windows. I've used it briefly from time to time and it has a very windows-like work flow for basic stuff. MacOS doesn't.
"I had similar issues with Y as you have had with X"
This was the nature of the statement.
You're conflating all Linux distros and window managers as being the same and as being similar to Windows, which is a non sequitur
I know but I am having issues with Y because of Y. I wouldn't have those issues with X.
If you're unwilling to engage with a new approach to performing the same tasks, then yes. Which was my point to begin with.
If you like windows stick with windows. You don't have to like something for the sake of it. Personal preference is what it is.
My point was it's a myth that MacOS is simple or efficient. Basic stuff is either overly complicated or straight up impossible.
It's not, you just don't know how to use it well. But I don't think this conversation will change that so it's all good.
M1 and M2 Macs have some of the worst pre-boot and recovery options I have ever seen.
If a BIOS update fails on them, they don't have any redundancy to fail back to a working BIOS. This has been standard on every business machine for at least 5 years. On any Dell or Lenovo machine, if your BIOS becomes borked, it either auto-recovers from a previous BIOS that is stored on your HDD/SSD, or it allows you to insert a USB drive with the BIOS on it and recovers from there.
The Mac BIOS can update during a standard OS update without indicating that you'll brick the machine if it powers off for any reason.
I had someone with a failed update on an M2 Mac that left the machine without a BIOS entirely. To recover, you need another Mac machine with USBC so you can plug them into each other and run Apple Configurator 2 to start a complete redownload of the OS to recover from.
It's at least an hour long process for something that should take 5 minutes to fix. Also, it requires another Mac, you can't run the recovery from any other OS.
Absolute baloney from Apple.
I hate Apple, but my Lenovo does exactly the same. It fucking installs BIOS updates automatically without any warning. Once, after a reboot it was hanging too much on a black screen and I thought it just froze, so I forced a shutdown by long pressing the power button. Luckily the BIOS restored via the fallback, but that wiped the TPM for some reason and because windows 11 on laptops automatically encrypts the drive with bitlocker I might have lost everything (luck again, I'm part of the 1% of the bitlocker users that actually keep an offline backup of the encryption key)
At least (I'm guessing, never bought any M1 Mac and will never do it) apple should be smart enough to disable the power button during BIOS updates, and maybe postpone the update on a low battery, leaving the danger only to desktop users
That's not necessarily a lenovo specific thing, windows can update bios if enabled (has been enabled by default of every modern windows device I own). When vendors push a new bios to the update catalog it's going to get automatically installed by default. Look for a setting in the security panel of the bios to turn this off, can't remember exactly what it's called.
Damn, that's sounds so painful. One more reason why I'll never buy one I guess. lol
The arm macs are really fast and the battery life is great. With that said I'm not shelling out for one. I'll gladly take one if my job pays for it.
I get the fast and the battery life and all that, but by principle, I just can never own one. I also never buy any windows laptop that is not upgradeable. I keep them for a while and want to be able to upgrade them. That's why I've been thinking of getting a framework laptop.
I couldn't imagine buying any laptop other than a Mac because the performance to battery life ratio on everything else is awful. Plus if you want a UNIX system, it's an easy buy.
After owning an Apple ARM laptop I'd never go back to anything else.
But is that an Apple thing or an ARM thing?
ARM, but Apple has the most advanced ARM chips and macOS /The AS Platform has the best amd64 to arm64 translation layer.
I have an M1 Macbook Air (under half price secondhand thanks to a superficial dent on a corner) and while I agree I love having such powerful hardware that sips battery so sparingly, MacOS can go eat a whole bag of stale dicks. Homebrew makes it... tolerable, but I'm holding out hope for that new Qualcomm ARM laptop - the recent benchmarks beat Apple's chips handily.
What do you hate about macOS? From my perspective, it beats out Windows in ease of use, performance, likelihood not to break, and being *NIX; and it beats out Linux by having things working out of the box without needing to spend a decade tinkering just to get things almost working right.
I use Windows for gaming (and work, unfortunately), Mac for general computing and programming, and Linux for servers and vms.
You can install Linux on it, the only major things not working yet are speakers and deep sleep
Those are both serious blockers for me tbh, I like to take it out away from home and watch YT / Nebula vids. I'm keeping am eye on Asahi's progress though.
Yeah, the speakers don't bother me too much since headphones still work. Deep sleep not working really sucks though since on macOS I've had it last for weeks without opening it and still having battery left.
You clearly haven't used Debian.
I've used a number of different Linux distros (including Debian) on laptops over the years. Although most recently my XPS 15 was running Arch.
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