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by dsimmons 1430 days ago
EDIT: I should point out that, although I don't like MacOS, I ditched Apple-related products first and foremost because of both the hardware itself and the company.

Every Apple product I've owned has failed in some spectacular way, and Apple's response is typically something along the lines of "You're SoL dude, you can either recycle it and buy a new product, or you can pay us something close to the value of the device to repair it" (because they solder everything unnecessarily).

Framework finally came along and showed that you can have a sleek, elegant (and modular!) design without soldering everything together in the name of reducing weight by 0.01kg or whatever (or making it a hair-width thinner).

Most recently, I had a 2019 Macbook Pro ($3K) that would frequently give me a "red screen of death" under load and crap out completely.

Before that, a brand new 2018 Macbook Pro I bought (for nearly $3K mind you) became unusable within an hour after taking it out of the box because of the faulty keyboard (several keys either didn't register key presses, or they would turn one key press into multiple occurrences of the same letter).

Before that, I had a Thunderbolt Display ($1K) that would fail intermittently, and it took 5 trips to the Apple store before they finally gave me a new one.

Before that, I had a 2014 Macbook Pro for which the screen started peeling off -- I had to buy a matte screen protector to even be able to see the screen.

I have several more examples as I go back in time further, but you get the gist! In all cases, they're widely known problems that Apple refuses to acknowledge, and assuming they're even willing to do anything about it, they want you to hand over your laptop to them for ~2 weeks in the meantime.

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Original response:

I'll eventually get around to writing a blog post about this (tm) and HN isn't really the place to fully brain dump, but off of the top of my head, here's a few examples:

- My ".osx" dotfiles (then, now ".macos") would break with every OS upgrade. As an example, I preferred to set a very fast key repeat with a very short delay, and I remember one version of OSX/MacOS that just decided to start ignoring that completely (or resetting it every restart or something, I forget).

- As a TL;DR point that summarizes many frustrations, I'd end up changing almost all of the default settings, to the point that I realized that I wasn't their target customer. For instance, I'd promptly disable all of their elaborate transitions and animations (which effectively added a latency to interacting with the system), hide the dock in perpetuity, etc etc... I haven't used MacOS in a few years, so I'm unable to refresh myself on what else I would change.

- Their window management is SO stupid (IMHO), especially once you start incorporating monitors.

- At least historically (unsure now), there was no way to differentiate the scroll behavior with the trackpad vs an external mouse. I did like the "natural" scrolling or whatever, as it felt very intuitive having used smartphones for many years. However, any time I connected a wireless mouse (primarily for gaming), it'd behave the same way (completely unintuitive), and there was no way to change it to be different. So I'd then have to either design for the least common denominator ("scrollwheel behavior"), or change that setting every single time I used an external mouse and remember to revert it when I'm done. A small nit, but one of tens of examples of annoyances.

I could go on, but like I mentioned, this isn't really the place! Just a few examples as a taste :)

2 comments

I had many hardware issues with Macbooks as well. The final straw for me was when I bought an expensive Apple-made monitor, and 50% of the time when unplugging my MBP from it, the MBP screen would stay off/blank rather than receiving the handoff. The only way to recover was to hold the power button. On a $4,000 setup. Where the same company controls the entire stack, on both devices. Absolutely inexcusable to buy a product set so expensive and so unreliable. The insult to the injury though was people telling me I must be doing something wrong because Apple stuff "just works." (I literally just plugged and unplugged a cable)
Yep, the prevalance of broken things and asinine limitations is what ultimately pushed me back towards Linux/Android. If I'm going to have to install extra software to make my experience tolerable, I may at least use the platform where those extensions don't cost me extra money on top of the hardware premium I'm already settling...
Apple made my wife pay $500 when we were tight on cash to fix the keyboard on her butterfly-edition macbook pro when two keys failed.. for the second time ( the first they did it for free under warranty)

I'm never touching one of their products if I don't have to again.. years later they had some class-action settlement where we could have I guess got money back but seriously screw that company where it matters they hang you out to dry