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by mschuster91 1610 days ago
At least their issues are relatively benign compared to the hot mess that is Windows. Had to re-install a friend's Asus all-in-one PC last weekend and god this was not fun. Took over a day worth of downloading Windows updates, battling Realtek's audio driver and Intel's chipset drivers until everything was finally working as expected (and most of the drivers are from 2016 - only God knows how much exploit surface these have!). Anything Bluetooth on Windows is still a hit-and-miss. And then you have to research on how to disable all the phone home crap, the ads and other bloat.

Linux is even worse, where even basic stuff such as suspend to disk or 3D acceleration regularly takes days or weeks worth of sifting through StackExchange posts, mailing lists, obscure blogs and 2010-era Debian Wiki posts.

And don't get me started on the clusterfuck that is Android. Got a new iPhone? No problem, transferring all the data is painless. Migrating in the Android world? Good luck getting even half of your stuff working.

Compared to all that, Apple is a fucking breeze to work with, because the competition is just mind bogglingly bad.

4 comments

Yeah, Apple is a breeze but only if you stay within the crib prison they put you in.
It's only bad for 3D because nVidia has their secret sauce (and corner cutting) in the driver and locked down firmware blobs that have very restrictive distribution.

If you have an Intel or AMD GPU everything either just works, or works with the latest drivers (might require an added repo if the card came out after the last stable release).

Android isn't a fair comparison, since Apple is a single-manufacturer monoculture.

Samsung-to-samsung: I can give anecdata only but moving to a new samsung phone was completely effortless. The only things that broke, broke because there was a newer android OS version on the target (not much of that). This would of course break (and maybe worse) on iPhone -> newer iPhone.

New Pixel data transfer? Plugged in iPhone with the supplied USB-C -> A adapter, and all my contacts, photos, calendar data, etc. migrated to the new phone. Took less time than my mom migrating from an iPhone 6s to an iPhone 13.