[sofixa]

The hardware is pretty good. Utterly unmaintainable, unserviceable and unapgradeable, extremely overpriced tiering (e.g. adding storage or RAM which you have to do at purchase time), with limited options (e.g. i cannot stand glossy screens with shitty reflections everywhere causing eye strain), but still very good. However the software (macOS) is pretty shit and IMO hard to adapt to coming from any other OS.

Raw performance per watt, and per weight/dimensions is best in class. For pure performance (e.g. an Asus ROG Zephyrus) or lightness (e.g. LG Gram) there are better options, but if you want all three it's hard to beat.

I personally think the hardware is so good, even with the caveats, but the software so bad that I'm honestly tempted to get an Air for portability or a Pro as a daily driver when Asahi Linux is good enough for me and the prices are right (so some sale or something, sticker prices are ridiculous if you max everything, and you kind of have to due to the impossibility of upgrades).

[kitsunesoba]

Serviceability is improved (though still not amazing) in all the machines with chassises redesigned during the "M" era — the "notched" MBP 14/16 and Air have easily accessible bottom screws (no need to remove rubber feet first) and don't have batteries glued in. Keyboards can be changed independently from the top case too. Notably, many Windows laptops fail on both of those counts (like the LG Gram which hides screws under adhesive-attached feet).

But yes, it's difficult to find laptops as well-rounded as MacBooks are. Generally laptops will require you to make significant sacrifices in multiple categories to be good at one or two things, which is less true of MacBooks (particularly the 14"/16" Pro models), especially if you want good performance without the laptop being huge and bulky and/or have horrible battery life with constantly-screaming fans. The 14"/16" models get you performance in the ballpark of a desktop Ryzen 5800X while unplugged and still getting great battery life while also being silent and still reasonably portable, along with a killer screen, great speakers, decent keyboard and great trackpad.

[tambourine_man]

Macs, for me, are the software. This is something that became pretty evident during the Intel era. And I bought Macs exclusively when the hardware was both much slower and pricier than PCs (68k and PPC), because I loved the software so much.

Funny to read such an opposite opinion.

I don’t mind the pretty casing, but it’s icing on the cake.

[coutego]

I'm quite sure it's just a question of what you are used to. It is for me, anyway.

My first PC (~year 2000) came with Windows but I wanted to use some software that only existed for Unix at the time and I was used to work in Unix anyway, so I heard about Linux and installed it. Great, I got an OS I was used to and the software I needed for my project.

When finally I had to use Windows for work a couple of years later it took time to adapt and, even to this day, I just find it easier to use Linux. It's just a metter of what you are used to.

Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management. Every other machine I use (Linux, Windows or ChromeOS) uses the same keybindings but in MacOS the same software I use everywhere else (e.g. Chrome) has been forced to change the standard keybindings to something else and and it's even not configurable. Programs just don't implement stuff as C-c to copy and C-v to paste. Programs link that functionality to S-c and S-v, instead. WTF? This means there is no remapping of the keyboard that can fix this, since the software itself is broken.

For me, this makes the machine pretty unusable. I'm a keyboard guy and quite fast at it. But when I'm in MacOS I waste a lot of time finding the right keybindings even for switching Windows. Example: S-w to close a tab but C-TAB to switch tabs %~(

[kitsunesoba]

> Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management.

For what it's worth, long time Mac users feel that *nix desktops and Windows have the same kind of "weirdness" you describe here. The majority of modern macOS conventions can be traced back to the original 1985 Mac or the 5-10 years following its introduction.

I started on macOS but can switch between control schemes pretty fluidly these days, thanks to having regularly used all three major OSes for several years. That said I wish there were at least one Linux DE that cloned macOS conventions as faithfully as the rest have cloned Windows conventions (with the exception of GNOME, which is more like what you'd get if you turned iPadOS into a desktop OS with Windows keyboard shortcuts).

[jemmyw]

There is a tool that makes Linux act as if it has Mac keybindings. https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto I've been using it, with some custom config, and it's made life a lot easier as I use a Mac and Linux laptop at the same time.

[rbreaves]

Thanks for the mention, I have tried hard to be faithful to mac conventions and to be honest it was both a harder and easier problem to tackle, several months.. maybe a year or more before it got to be really solid but it sorta requires one to think about it in layers so you're not really killing yourself to remap every little thing individually lol.

[tambourine_man]

The command key is one of the great accidental geniuses of macOS (née Mac OS X).

It used to be just a Mac thing, but when the OS became Unix, you suddenly had a GUI key (command) and a command line key (control). Which is great for mental split and flexibility.

You can have Ctrl-C to cancel and Cmd-C to copy on the same Terminal app.

And you get to use both command/option/shift + arrow keys along with readline/Emacs shortcuts on any native text input. So sweet.

[rsynnott]

I wonder if this response is because common Linux desktop environments are _so_ derivative of Windows these days. I started using MacOS around 2004 (the G4 iBook was _amazing_ in its day; if you wanted a Unix-y laptop with decent battery life, working power management and wifi, and vaguely affordable, it was the only game in town), having previously been using Linux since about 2001 and Windows before that. At that time, Linux desktop environments generally didn't use the same conventions as Windows anyway, so moving to MacOS wasn't that jarring.

[dagmx]

You can swap cmd and ctrl in the keyboard prefs to give you more Windows/Linux like key commands.

Personally I think CMD is more ergonomic but muscle memory trumps all I suppose

[coutego]

Unfortunately, that doesn't solve the problem.

The issue is not which labels keys have printed on them. I don't look at my keyboards and I always remap keys for them to be in the positions I like. That's fine and works in MacOS.

The issue is that the same application (Chrome, for example, but happens with most of them) uses the same key combinations in Windows, Linux, Chrome OS and Android (I use DeX from time to time on my S7 Tab) to do something but then decides to do something different in MacOS _without giving the user the possibility to fix it_.

Chrome example: C-w closes a tab and C-TAB changes tab in the first four OSs. In MacOS, though, it's S-w and C-TAB, respectively. There is no remapping which can fix this because the correspondence between keymappings on a given modifier key is not a bijection. The only possibility would be that each program gave the user the option to "use standard keymappings". But very few do, AFAIK. Emacs is the only one that works the same on all systems. But I also need a browser ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

I'm not saying that MacOS convention is worse or better than the standard. In fact, I personally like the idea of having the CTRL-like functionality on my thumbs, rather than my pinkies, and I could migrate to this layout on all computers I use (via key remaping, in the same way that I already have remapped on all computers I use the ESC key on the place that normally CAPS is). I'm just saying that using MacOS makes me slower, both when using MacOS itself _and_ when using the other OSs, since suddenly I have to conciously decide which key combo to use. Normally this was something that just happened subconciously and didn't interrupt my flow.

[brailsafe]

I use an MS sculpt keyboard and use Karabiner to swap the keys.

[dagmx]

You can swap them in the system preferences without needing extra software. At least for the modifier keys

[ask_b123]

Is S = command?

What I'm seeing is: close a tab -> cmd+w; copy something -> cmd+c; switch tab -> cmd+option+left/right arrow, switch window -> cmd + `

[umanwizard]

Yes, coutego is using Emacs notation for key chords, in which S-whatever means what macOS users would call cmd+whatever, Windows users would call win+whatever, etc. "S" stands for "Super" key.

[sofixa]

Same thing with keyboard mapping, it really bothers me. However I've found that using a keylogger to remap (Karabiner) works decently with very few exceptions (iTerm).

[kitsunesoba]

I'm personally a fan of macOS as well, but I can see the draw in wanting to run something else on them. I have a ThinkPad dual booting Windows and Fedora and it's not terrible as far as generic x86 laptops go, but in many ways it's not as nice as my work MacBook. If Linux ran as well on say a MacBook Air as it does on that ThinkPad, the ThinkPad would likely be replaced with an Air and any Windows needs being handled by a Windows VM or RDP session to my custom built tower.

[Maursault]

> And I bought Macs exclusively when the hardware was both much slower and pricier than PCs (68k and PPC), because I loved the software so much.

Incredible that these myths are being perpetuated by a Mac user. The fact is that at release, new Macs (including 68k and PPC) were always the most performant machines available in their class. Always. You could buy a cheaper x86, but it wasn't as powerful on that date. And the fact is, Mac prices were and are always within $100 of a feature-matched PC. The problem was consistently that PC consumers didn't want the included hardware features, wanted other features that weren't included, and translated that they could buy a much shittier PC for less as Macs being outrageously expensive. It was always bullshit. Ornery PC consumers were never Apple's market. Macs were and are the computer "for the rest of us." And, ironically, everything Apple designs gets copied poorly by Microsoft and PC manufacturers. Asahi is the inverse of Hackintosh. Both ideas are somewhat ridiculous. I want a Ford engine in my Chevy powered by tomato soup!

[tambourine_man]

At release, they mostly were. As soon as G3 was released it screamed. But then Intel kept bumping MHz every 6 months or so. Same with the G5, but that margin lasted even less. The G4 was just a sad period in the PPC line up on desktops. They made for good laptops though.

[Maursault]

> The G4 was just a sad period in the PPC line up on desktops.

Not really. In 1999, the US government classified them as supercomputers and banned their export to over 50 countries. Apple tried to make hay of it, but almost immediately started lobbying to get the ban lifted. The last G4 tower was released in June 2003 and discontinued a year later and just got old by 2006 because Motorola already left AIM, and IBM wasn't delivering. Not Apple's fault, and the reason for the platform jump to Intel. But, again, at release, any of the high end G4 machines were faster than any consumer Intel tower, though 2003-2006 gave them plenty of time to catch up and pass the G4. The Mirrored Drive Doors 2003 dual 1.25GHz G4 was... is still a pretty sweet machine. It is still in use in Pro Tools studios because Digi equipment and plugins were expensive, and none of the PPC Digi components work on Intel. Try sourcing one. You'll be shocked what MDD 2003 DP sell for in 2022 at 18-19yo.

[tambourine_man]

Yeah, I was around back then. It was faster if the code was heavily optimized for AltiVec like Photoshop Gaussian Blur, image interpolation, audio filters, etc. But most general purpose code was not.

The G4s were overclocked for most of their life and stuck behind a 133mhz bus that choked the whole system. The MDDs you cite even gained the unaffectionate “Wind Tunnel” nick name. I hope whoever worked in Pro Tools with such machines had it running in a different room.

I remember a video studio still running a 68k Quadra that had some crazy expensive Avid board in 2001 or something, so I'm not surprised by high end equipment lasting a long time. Though I imagine you could emulate it on a laptop these days. Depending on 20yo hardware that ran really hot for most of its life it's not a recipe for peace of mind.

I was a huge enthusiast of 68k and the PPC and was devastated when Apple switched to Intel. Mediocrity won, I thought. Even though both architectures were much more interesting than x86, the reality of chip manufacturing is that scale is almost everything. Intel had it then, mobile phone chips have it now.

[psychoslave]

I started to use a Mac for work a few months ago, first time in my life.

I am still often frustrated with keyboard shortcuts, despite having installed a dedicated software to not feel in such an alien place. Sure there is a lot of muscle memory you can blame here. But how does it happens that the default OS doesn't provide the software option? Brew is nice, but here too it's community work filling the hole of the default.

I miss the home, end and del key on the integrated keyboard.

The only way to shutdown the integrated screen and still have the camera usable is to duplicate the screen and diminish brightness to zero. Or use a magnet. Seriously?

No key to show the contextual keyboard.

Where is my select and paste with middle click, outside iTerm2 (community provided)?

Why is there no straight forward way to browse the actual file path in Finder, when a shortcut allows to copy it? It's possibly the file manager that made me feel the most clueless in my life.

It is not like everything is utterly horrible, but I was very surprised at how frustrating it could be as a daily driver. I didn't discovered anything that I would miss from it when I go back on something as basic as a vanilla Gnome.

[wtallis]

> The only way to shutdown the integrated screen and still have the camera usable is to duplicate the screen and diminish brightness to zero. Or use a magnet. Seriously?

Can you describe what your use case for this is, because this complaint sounds truly bizarre to me. You want to use the webcam at the top of the laptop display, while not using the laptop display itself, but using a separate display (and thus presumably not looking anywhere near the webcam)? Are you pointing the webcam at something other than yourself?

> No key to show the contextual keyboard.

What do you mean by contextual keyboard?

> Where is my select and paste with middle click, outside iTerm2 (community provided)?

The first-party Terminal provides that feature, too. But the rest of the OS doesn't natively.

[psychoslave]

Well, I use the webcam for visio calls. So I'm not completely facing the camera usually, indeed.

I meant contextual menu. The only way to open in it in a Mac arms seems to be to use the secondary mouse button.

My bad for the paste in the terminal. I moved to an other terminal for an other reason I can't remember right now. But yeah it is the middle click in general that I miss. To be fair, Windows doesn't provide it either.

[kitsunesoba]

> Why is there no straight forward way to browse the actual file path in Finder, when a shortcut allows to copy it?

In Finder, selecting View > Show Path Bar will place a persistent path bar on each window. Additionally command clicking the proxy icon that appears when hovering over finder titlebars will open a path menu (and also works in any application with a proxy icon in its titlebar).

To go to a path, select Go > Go to Folder… or tap Command-Shift-G. This can be rebound to a more convenient shortcut in System (Preferences|Settings) > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Command-Option-C will copy the path of the currently selected item to the clipboard.

[psychoslave]

Wonderful, thank you so much. :)

[breakfastduck]

Option + arrow / cmd + arrow does exactly the same as end / home etc, if you've just not found that yet.

I always find it interesting when people complain about keyboard shortcuts on macOS - but I feel exactly the same when I use anything else.

macOS keyboard shortcuts are amazing and os-wide. But they're not made obvious. Its really kinda snobbish that apple just assume you know them they treat it like 'because obviously youve used a mac forever'.

[Tsiklon]

Incredibly useful document for the new mac user with experience on other platforms - https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201236

[tambourine_man]

They aren't obvious on Windows either, are they? Keyboard shortcuts are mostly a pro user thing.

And don’t get me started on the way that OS inserts special keys. How do you insert ® on Windows? Alt-01whoCanRemember? On the Mac it’s usually something that makes sense like Option + R. Ç? Option-C. ƒ? You guessed it.

[psychoslave]

>They aren't obvious on Windows either, are they?

No, of course. But the gap between linux and windows for that matter is really smaller, thus my surprise. All the more with the way Apple is marketed as so great in ergonomics.

>Keyboard shortcuts are mostly a pro user thing.

Sure, I would not use a Mac had my employer not provided it. Like many coders out there I guess. But Apple is not willing to pay attention to the adoption ease for this population it seems. Or at least, it doesn't feel like this to me.

>And don’t get me started on the way that OS inserts special keys. How do you insert ® on Windows?

I use a bépo layout everywhere, with it the answer is obvious. It comes out of the box in linux distros. Mac and Windows require third party installation. The Mac one is a bit less functional/buggy. The worst issue being that my IDE won't recognize the combination for underscore. It's more a responsibility of IDE producer here certainly. But still, it makes the Mac UX far less pleasant from a dev point of view.

[kitsunesoba]

I remember Mac-style mnemonic shortcuts for special characters way better than I do alt codes. If I were building a Mac style DE that's probably one of the features that would be added.

[ndrake]

And if you're used to Emacs/Readline keybindings, those will work in most Mac text inputs

[psychoslave]

I went to documentation and found those, nothing to complaint about here. But muscle memory is not something you can switch right away easily in my experience. I'm OK to look at them and possibly learn them when I'll have time for this.

In the meanwhile, I wanted something that would let me focus on my work, not being distracted by basic key combination struggle every few inputs. Karabiner, which is community driven, led me to such a mostly OK situation here.

To me what is baffling is that Apple, with its ridiculously high revenue stream and all its marketing on great UX, is unable to provide that out of the box.

[tambourine_man]

>I miss the home, end and del key on the integrated keyboard.

What do you mean? They’re all there on apple extended keyboards and are accessible via fn key on laptops. I mostly use command/option arrow keys, which, along with shift are also an amazing Mac feature.

>The only way to shutdown the integrated screen and still have the camera usable is to duplicate the screen and diminish brightness to zero. Or use a magnet. Seriously?

I don’t know if I understand you but you can turn the screen off without sleeping in multiple ways, like keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Shift-Eject) or assign a screen hot corner for the mouse.

> No key to show the contextual keyboard.

What?

>Where is my select and paste with middle click, outside iTerm2 (community provided)?

It’s not a thing. I use it for exposé. Sounds barbaric to select with the middle button pressed though. Your dexterity goes out the window.

>Why is there no straight forward way to browse the actual file path in Finder, when a shortcut allows to copy it?

There are a couple. Straightforward might mean accustomed to, tough in this context.

>It's possibly the file manager that made me feel the most clueless in my life. It is not like everything is utterly horrible, but I was very surprised at how frustrating it could be as a daily driver.

The Finder leads a double life. It inherited traits from both the classic Mac OS (spatial Finder) and the NeXT (column browser). And it shows. Both can be very powerful but their coexistence is confusing at first.

[tambourine_man]

On a second thought, there where some transformative hardwares though.

The iMac 5k for me, almost a decade later, is still better than anything other vendors have to offer. It’s my childhood dream monitor. Such a shame that they never sold it separately.

The M series laptops seem like an inflection point as well. A fanless powerhouse with more than a day's work of battery life and best in class monitor and trackpad.

[rsynnott]

> Such a shame that they never sold it separately.

Well, they sold the controversial LG 5K, which was the same panel, but certainly not the same build quality. I've got one, and it's... fine, and for a very long time was literally the only 5K monitor you could buy, but for the price it is not a well-built piece of kit. (And the first two versions had weird bugs)

They now (nearly a decade later) finally sell a fully first-party one, which is very similar.

[musicale]

The 2016 LG 5K is still my preferred monitor. In retrospect it was a surprisingly good investment at its $974 introductory price (~$1100 in 2022.)

The Apple Studio Display certainly improves on it, but at ~$1600 it costs more than a midrange 24" iMac.

It's too bad that the iMac 5K didn't support Target Display Mode. Maybe Apple will bring it back someday along with a new 27" iMac.

[rsynnott]

I was really hoping this would come back once it was feasible (at the time it came out, the only vaguely well-supported way to do it would have been two DP cables, but later versions of DP and Thunderbolt 3 and better can handle 5k without trouble), but, given that the 5K iMac is now gone, I wouldn't hold out too much hope...

[pram]

They do:

https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/

[tambourine_man]

You’re correct! How could I forget. Thanks. Shows I haven’t been shopping for Macs in a long time.

[beebeepka]

I am with the other guy - great hardware, with the m1, married to a barely usable software. I hadn't been forced to used it in a decade, and imho, but hasn't gotten much better. At least it's got brew going for it.

Horrible peripherals, too. I guess you love them for the same reasons I hate them.

[musicale]

> extremely overpriced tiering (e.g. adding storage or RAM

As I understand it, Apple uses a "system in a package" multi chip module that mounts RAM inside the same package as the main M1/M2 SoC.

Seems to work well in terms of memory bandwidth, unified memory architecture, and physical size, but it's hard to crack that SIP/MCM open to add more RAM.

And it's even harder to add RAM to an SoC die itself. And the GPU is integrated as well (although in theory one could connect an eGPU over Thunderbolt - assuming the driver issues could be sorted out somehow.)

Some old Macs from the 1990s included an external L2 cache SRAM slot. But cache RAM upgrades became impossible once the L2 cache was integrated on the CPU die.

[goosedragons]

Even on the remaining Intel models having Apple upgrade the RAM is a bad deal. The Intel Mac Mini has socketed RAM and they want $1000 for 64GB of DDR4 2666. You can get 64GB DDR4 3200 sodimms for less than $200 right now. Even in 2018 it was a bad deal. I put 32GB in the one I had for less than a third the price Apple was asking.

And for storage that isn't on the SoC, it's just flash chips on the board so it shouldn't be much different cost wise to what the M.2 drive manufacturers are paying. Yet it costs considerably more.

[astrange]

Glossy screens have better picture quality (black levels) in any situation where you can control the lighting. That’s usually true for laptops because you can just put it on your lap and swing around to avoid sunshine.

[sofixa]

> That’s usually true for laptops because you can just put it on your lap and swing around to avoid sunshine.

So the options are extreme eye strain due to lights/sun/my own reflection, or extreme back pain due to having to sit like a prawn to hide the light from the laptop? I'd take slightly lower visual quality (doesn't matter in the slightest for what i do on a screen) over either of those.

[astrange]

The glossy screens' higher contrast should lead to less eye strain in the end. That's a big reason for better visual quality, like HiDPI displays and OLEDs.

[bernawil]

it's true for everything. You can even more so control the lighting and orientation of a desktop. Matte screens are the industry's worst mistake and I just can't understand why everybody hadn't ditched them already.