[pedrogpimenta]

I have been a faithful Apple/macOS since 2002. Always very happy and proud.

I have now switched to Windows on my Macbook Pro and I'm liking it. It's not as polished as macOS still, but I think (and hope) it's getting there. I don't think I'll ever buy another Apple machine. Windows has turned around since those times, I recommend you give it a try if you're thinking about it or you're unhappy with how Apple has become nowadays.

I almost feel free to choose whatever machine I want next and not pay a hefty price for it. Or pay it, if I want to, but it will be my choice, not imposed.

[chrisseaton]

> It's not as polished as macOS still

But isn't this the most important thing?

Yes this RAM is expensive... but it's just a few hundred dollars for something I use every day for all my income and most of my hobbies and the alternative is something hobbled.

[ChuckNorris89]

Just like a Toyota Corolla isn't as polished as a Mercedes S class but ultimately they get the same job done.

Whether the polish is worth the significant premium is up to each individual buyer.

[threatofrain]

> and the alternative is something hobbled.

Is the difference between a Toyota and a Mercedes one of being "hobbled"?

[ChuckNorris89]

Nope because the difference between these OS is also not hobble IMHO. But I get it since HN is a very pro Mac bubble. In Europe Macs are a rare sight due to the cost mostly so I learned to get my work done with Linux and Windows. Would the extra price for OSX hardware make me more productive? Probably not but each to his own.

[colejohnson66]

HN is not a “pro Mac bubble”. It’s actually quite the opposite; Every time sometime about Macs or macOS is posted, the comments are always about how they’ve “finally dropped the ball” and are failing. On articles about the bemoaned butterfly keyboards, comments saying they like them are downvoted.

[mercer]

Plus, Macs are far from a rare sight in 'Europe'...

[pedrogpimenta]

It is very very important, but I used "polished" and "as polished as". "Not polished" doesn't mean it's not stable, or everything breaks. It means there are several small annoyances or some things that could be improved. And it is highly polished compared with how I remember it. It's just not on par with what macOS was a few years ago, which I definitely think it's not nowadays.

Also, I only recommend that people TRY it, not make the jump.

[huffmsa]

A single 8gb stick of ddr4 is ~$30-$40 on Amazon right now.

A single stick of ddr3 is $20-30.

Apple is charging $200 for that same stick of RAM.

It likely costs them $10 or less since they buy in bulk.

Their UI isn't work paying them a 10x margin. That's fucking ridiculous.

[chrisseaton]

It doesn't matter what the margin is, to me.

All I care about is is it worth it to pay $200 more for a MacBook with 16 GB rather than 8 GB. Yes it is to me, because I can get that money back and more from the value it gives me.

I don't care how much you can buy the RAM for elsewhere, because what can I do with that? It's not of any use to me when it's not inside a MacBook, is it? It's irrelevant.

[huffmsa]

Fair enough.

[Bud]

Apple doesn't use "sticks" of RAM. There are other problems with your comment as well, but let's just start there.

[huffmsa]

> non-standard proprietary nonsense

Right, forgot this is Apple we're talking about

[emerongi]

Then charge for the software, not the RAM?

[colejohnson66]

I’m thinking it’s a psychological thing: when one buys software, they tend to feel entitled to do what they want with that software, such as installing it wherever they want. But when one buys hardware, they tend to feel entitled to do what they want with that hardware, such as installing whatever they want. I’m reminded of open source software where criticisms of said software are usually met with, “Well, it’s open source. Just fix it yourself.”

Besides, why shouldn’t they charge for a RAM upgrade? It costs them money to add more (RAM chips aren’t cheap), so they pass that cost on to the customer with a markup that the customer is willing to pay.

[chrisseaton]

Why should they?

[emerongi]

Just out of respect for the customer. Of course this is a common pricing tactic in a lot of markets (cheap printer, expensive ink), but it always feels disrespectful.

I'd be fine with just an "Apple tax" added on top of the bill. The average consumer might not have the same reaction, so maybe this is the only way of adding the tax.

[chrisseaton]

> I'd be fine with just an "Apple tax" added on top of the bill.

I can't understand this point of view - why do you care how the person you're buying from is breaking down their charges?

If you're a rational person all that should matter to you is are you getting the value that you want from the transaction. If you are and you can't get better value elsewhere then go for it. How the price came to be determined is completely irrelevant. Either it works for you or it doesn't.

[ed25519FUUU]

Exactly. For hobby I’ll tinker with Linux. It doesn’t matter if there’s weird bugs and quarks, if I have time I’ll try and figure out what’s happening.

For my money maker I need it to work reliably 100% of the time. I don’t want to ever tinker with drivers. I just want it to work in a polished way.

[thequux]

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, I lose about a day a year to weird Linux quirks, and I run an extremely non-standard setup that has accumulated over the course of the last ~20 years. Back when I was using a Mac full-time, (~2010ish), I lost much more than that to things not working the way I needed them to. While I'll freely admit that a large part of this is that I have an unusually in-depth knowledge of how Linux works, my knowledge from 20 years ago is still useful, whereas it felt like every OSX update made a big chunk of my knowledge of the internals obsolete. I barely recognize a modern OSX system.

[usui]

This is exactly it. My 2015 MacBook Pro with an upgraded 2TB SSD has the best balanced software engineer setup I can ask for between customizability and bells & whistles. Every time I have tried to use Linux, I could never find a way to find the very smooth, easy, performant way to clear Terminal buffer with no scrollback (CMD+K). The best I have seen is some kind of reset command bound to a key.

Windows is pure garbage and the only time I ever touch it is in a VM running on my MacBook, and even then I strictly require it to be Enterprise version so that I never have to deal with the adware bloat or forced updates. On regular Windows 10, you can disable updates, but never permanently. It always comes back like a specter.

My MacBook has never forced me to restart or install an update. The UI for updates can get a little annoying, but there are Terminal tricks to disable it, and I still have choice.

The shell library is not as good on Windows. I cannot muster the motivation to learn PowerShell.

I never feel safe installing anything on Windows. What I mean is I never understand what is actually changing on my computer if something installs on Windows. On a MacBook, I can drag and drop to Applications. If I need to uninstall it, I delete it. It's that simple. For anything that forces me to install via pkg file, I am happy that most of the time, homebrew cask has a formula for it, so uninstallation is handled for me cleanly.

The only good thing I can think of for Windows is that GUI automation is much better due to AutoHotKey. MacOS GUI automation is basically deprecated at this point (AppleScript) on most apps, so you are forced to find third-party options.

AirDrop between my iPad Pro and MacBook is so fast, it allows me to copy my iPad's handwritten notes into a pdf in an instant.

One good thing I can say for Windows is backwards compatibility for compiled apps. Most open source projects I see with a MacOS binary have a high chance of not working relative to Windows. On Windows, if I see a compiled binary, I already know it will probably work.

The OS is what keeps me to my MacBook, and if no other competitor can produce the equivalent experience, I can't move away.

Look at all the software engineers in the Bay Area, and you will see waves upon waves of MacBooks. This "standardization" of hardware has also somewhat reduced the instances of coworkers using the excuse of "Oh it works on my computer, must be a hardware issue." If both of us are using MacBooks, I know it's a software issue, and so it's something we can probably figure out and fix.

I'm desperate to move away from the dark, abuse direction Apple is taking macOS, and I love the software so-much-so that I made a desktop Hackintosh, but getting it to run was more work than getting hardware to work on Linux (still was worth it). I only wonder when the final time will come where Hackintosh doesn't work and my 2015 MacBook Pro stops working. 2015 MBP was the last year for selling MBPs with removable storage. 2015 MBP will be remembered as the best laptop for its replaceable SSD and laptop keyboard.

[pedrogpimenta]

> Windows is pure garbage

Yes... pure garbage. Very objective vision.

> On a MacBook, I can drag and drop to Applications. If I need to uninstall it, I delete it. It's that simple.

This is a lie. Applications in macOS save files outside of Applications, sometime you don't know where, and you need other apps if you want to completely delete the data. There are also installers for macOS and portable apps for Windows (where you put it where you want, and to uninstall it just delete it). There are also package managers like homebrew for windows (chocolatey for example) but all of these are not made or endorsed by Apple or Microsoft.

> AirDrop between my iPad Pro and MacBook is so fast

It's fast when it works and many many time it doesn't at first, you need to fiddle around with it. And if any excuse is somethin like "it works with newer machines" they're not valid.

----

With this, I don't want to convince you to switch, but I think Windows can be valid for many people that are not considering it right now, as I wasn't. And it is only getting better, whereas you can't really say the same for macOS.

[Sangeppato]

MacOS Is still much cleaner though. 99% of apps only put some config files in my ~/Library folder (and homebrew can easily remove them all with the 'zap' command). On Windows, I always don't understand what the heck happened when I installed a program and the whole registry thing is just garbage. The other day I uninstalled "Everything" but it was still showing up among "start-up item". I had to go hunting in the registry to make it disappear.

I try to use Scoop whenever I can exactly for this reason: I want to use portable apps every time it's possible, they're just cleaner

[usui]

Take my above post with a grain of salt, as I don't think I need to tell you that I was not going for an objective viewpoint, by any stretch of the imagination.

I just wanted to explain to anyone who was wondering why people would be willing to pay $200 for more RAM unnecessarily. It is be because we are trapped in macOS and there is no good alternative (again, an opinion, not objective). Many people have commented confusion on why we subject ourselves to pricing like this.

Windows UI and Linux Subsystem is a whole other set of things which I disagree with, but I don't want to get into it. All I want to say is that I grew up with Windows, I used it for decades, and it took leaving it for me to realize how much more fun software development could be without Windows.

For gaming purposes, I can be found using Windows, no problem. Either way, this is a very subjective discussion that has been beaten to death by different sides over the decades, so we should temper our expectations on whatever productive discussions can be had over such topics, and the best I can say is that I am happy that we, as users, ultimately have freedom to choose, rather than be forced into a monopoly.

I personally think Linux (smartphone, desktop, laptop) has the biggest delta and promise as of recent, so we should all cross our fingers and hope for the best for an open-source, generally usable OS for everyone.

[pedrogpimenta]

On this I agree with you :)

[whatch]

CTRL+L clears terminal in all Ubuntu versions I have used (16.04+) and works out of the box.

Didn't use Mac for some time. Is CMD+K behavior different in some way?

[usui]

Yes, CTRL+L clears the terminal, but if I scroll up with my mouse, it returns lines that were cleared, making it difficult to distinguish between the two points. On Ubuntu, the closest I have come to macOS's CMD+K is binding a key to either "reset" or "tput", but those have some kind of delay or still add one extra line at the top. On macOS, it's instant, with no artifacts.

[Jtsummers]

C-l is form feed, it makes sense it'd leave everything else visible when you scroll up because it doesn't clear anything, it's effect is that of a page break.

[VonGuard]

I did this 4 years ago, with a move to Linux after well over 20 years of being a diehard Mac Fanboy. What did it for me was the fact that Apple hardware cannot be fixed except by Apple. I used to take apart Powerbook Duos, which were a huge pain and not made to be easy to take apart, but at least, Apple didn't actively work against you taking it apart.... LIke the Power Mac 8500, it was a really tight, difficult to get into design, but you could still do it.... Now, you open an Imac and it's broken by opening it. Permanently. On the motherboard.

[yryan]

Which model iMac breaks the motherboard by opening?

[VonGuard]

mine was a 2013. You pull the monitor forward and it breaks the cable mount that connects it to the motherboard . The tollerance diference between opening it and breaking it is like 1 millimeter, i swear. It is unopenable without a special tool.

[sjwright]

Sure, if you don’t avail yourself of freely available disassembly guides before opening your iMac, you’ll probably break it. Bad Apple.

[whywhywhywhy]

Had to move some of my workflow to windows too just because Apple's GPUs are so weak. Honestly been a less bumpy transition than I expected as someone who hasn't run windows since Win 2000.

It's not perfect but here's the thing, Microsoft are iterating on it with two major versions a year and they're fixing the old bad parts of it bit by bit while Apple ignores Mac OS in favor of pushing iPads as the future.

[ChrisRR]

And yet arguably it's not even more polished, it's just got more visual effects.

For a software developer like me, who has to jump through so many hoops in order to do any work, or just flat out can't run some compilers that are windows only, this is different.

And as far as usability is concerned, I think Apple lost their, "it just works" values years back. Nowadays it's just a case of whichever OS you use first is the one you're used to

[pedrogpimenta]

I do think it is more polished in many ways, but Windows is improving with each release, macOS is not.