[tomkadwill]

I think a lot of devs use a mac because they get a UNIX machine without the hassle of installing linux. Now, it feels like the barrier to entry for installing linux is falling and at the same time the mac has stopped evolving. Also, the price seems to have jumped significantly (I live in the UK so part of that is exchange rate)

[dangoor]

It's not that installing Linux is a hassle. I just love a lot of the apps I can run on my Mac. OmniFocus, 1Password and DevonThink are two I have running now. I've also got OmniGraffle, Affinity Photo/Designer, Pixelmator and Keynote at least that I use fairly regularly (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some). I do a fair bit that is cross-platform and would work fine on Linux, but there are a lot of Mac-specific apps that are really well designed and a joy to use and I would miss them.

(And, yes, there are open source replacements for all of these that run on Linux. I know, but the UX is not the same!)

[lj3]

> It's not that installing Linux is a hassle. I just love a lot of the apps I can run on my Mac.

I think that's a huge X factor a lot of the latest discussions are missing. People LOVE MacOS apps. They're beautiful. They work well. They're typically fast. They're user friendly. Windows and Linux apps are none of those things. In my experience, Mac users don't mind paying for Mac apps because they tend to be of high quality. Windows and Linux users won't pay for apps unless they absolutely have to because the quality of the available apps varies so much.

[sylv3r]

> People LOVE MacOS apps

While true, a lot of us can live with less beautiful machines and software especially if the prettier machine makes us break our workflow (ie how to vim without an esc button)

[splintercell]

Even if you have an escape key, you shouldn't really be using the physical Escape key for Esc, it's against the philosophy of Vim.

[NelsonMinar]

"X factor". 11/10 would pun again.

[lj3]

And here I thought my jokes were wasted on hacker news. :)

[dijit]

1password was a weird one for me, I operate on BSD/Linux and very seldomly my Mac (I use an iPhone though) and I wanted to stick with 1password because it allowed me to access my passwords from my phone.

Luckily they use an open specification for the database they use which has a python module[0] and I've started building my own interfaces[1] to interact with the keychain in much cooler ways.

It's no 1password.app though. :(

[0] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/blimey/0.9.4

[1] https://git.drk.sc/dijit/password-utils

[rdavis]

The lack of a native 1Password client is one of the last major pain points I live with day to day in Linux.

Those Python utilities actually look really useful but as far as I can tell, they only interface with the older .agilekeychain version of the 1Password vault. I've been looking for something similar that understands the newer .opvault format but am yet to find anything that just works.

[wlesieutre]

The Windows 1Password client actually works fine under Wine, including its browser integration. But the Windows version is't nearly as nice as the Mac one, and you get the usual Wine sorts of issues.

Biggest one is that the password prompt will pop up and have a blinking text cursor even though it's not actually the active window, just the active window within the Windows layer. Whoops, hope you didn't type your master password anywhere leaky.

[gtf21]

> I just love a lot of the apps I can run on my Mac

This is pretty much the reason I haven't switched to linux; it's not that OSX/macOS is particularly incredible, but that 1Password, Alfred and some other apps don't work on linux.

[dangoor]

Funny that you mention Alfred and I forgot to. It's so built in to how I do things on my Mac that I forgot all about it!

I also use Dash regularly while I work, often in conjunction with Alfred.

[tomkadwill]

I agree. I've tried using webapps instead (evernote, slack, 1Password) but there are often features missing and the experience is not the same as running the Mac app.

[pier25]

Design tools on Linux are still not good enough. It would be awesome if Affinity released their software for Linux since Adobe is not going to.

[RoboErectus]

Twice I've tried going a year exclusively on Linux. Both times (2009 and 2015) I spent enough time fiddling with things to give up.

Cygwin is pretty good. With sshd and putty you've got a decent setup.

But there are still little things that osx does better. Virtual desktop support finally showed up in Windows about a decade late. But keyboard shortcuts are still a crapshoot.

Text selection and cursor navigation being uniform across everything is nice once it all becomes automatic.

Osx has its own list of problems... But most of them are solvable in a well supported way.

Running Linux desktop full time.. logging in every day is a roll of the dice. The Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) just isn't here yet.

[shams93]

From the pro audio side of things Bitwig is a game changer, I can actually run bitwig and renoise on my asus chromebox running crouton on an sd card and it all runs shockingly well considering I spent less than $200 for this device.

[zanny]

That and several System76 notebooks and the Dell XPS one are fairly high quality. They might not meet the Macbook standard, but a lot of that is just bragging rights at the end of the day anyway.

You really don't even need to install Ubuntu anymore. Other distros, yeah, but you also know your hardware is fully supported at least.

[jm547ster]

I'm hearing mixed reports on System76, issue with hw compatibility with the pre-installed OSes and the hardware itself just being a rebrand of other machines

[base698]

I saw a bunch of horror stories on Reddit. I'm definitely off the Mac train currently, so I hope I find an alternative.

[madaxe_again]

I'm in the same ship - I have a nice several year old MBP but unless apple come up with something compelling my next machine will be something else running Linux.

That all said, I think apple are up to more than is immediately apparent. They're spending huge amounts on r&d. From the frankly incremental improvements seen on their existing hardware line over the last several years the majority is going somewhere unseen. We saw patents for hmd/ar related tech a few years back.

I wouldn't be surprised if they do something nobody currently expects and move aggressively into the hmd/ar space.

[HalfwayToDice]

I live in the UK so part of that is exchange rate

UK Macbook Pros are the cheapest in Europe dollarwise, so that can't be true.

[dguaraglia]

It's a huge difference. As someone who's lived in the UK before: paying ~£1500 for a computer is a lot. A good software engineer salary in London is ~£60k a year, with only really good salaries going significantly beyond that (I've heard of quants and super senior people making ~£100k, but that's the exception not the norm.) That means that, if you live in the Bay Area and make a reasonable $120k, you are basically paying double for your Mac in London.

I recall at some point, some software prices (like the full Adobe suite) were so inflated in the UK that it was cheaper to fly to New York, spend a couple days there, and buy the licenses there, than it did to buy them in the UK.

We (as in, us living in the Bay Area and the US in general) live in a bubble where the iPhone is barely more expensive than other phones and Macs, while expensive, are still comfortably within our reach because our salaries are way above average.

[soneil]

This isn't really a mac problem though. Brexit sank the pound. Others will start correcting their prices too (if they haven't already)

[dguaraglia]

Actually, Apple products were always almost a 1:1 USD to GBP translation, which doesn't really make sense. If anything, I'm surprised that Apple hasn't increased their prices to match the depreciation of the sterling.

[kgwgk]

Being the cheapest dollarwise doesn't conflict with prices having jumped recently (in local currency) due to the movement in exchange rates (price changes tend to be abrupt with Apple products because they rarely change the price of a product until the next generation is released).