[tlrobinson]

I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable for an engineer using a device for 8+ hours every day to pay an additional, say, 0.5% of their income (assuming very conservatively $100,000 income after tax, $1,000 extra for a MacBook, 2 year product lifespan) for the best built laptop, best screen, and best OS.

[yunobcool]

$100,000 after tax does not seem conservative to me (at least outside the US).

[tlrobinson]

$50,000 income, 4 year product lifespan?

Obviously doesn’t apply to all engineers.

[rfoo]

> and best OS

I do networking stuff and macOS is on par with Windows - I can't live on it without running into bugs or very questionable behavior for longer than a week. Same as Windows.

[klabb3]

What stuff is weird? I have so far had very good experiences with Apple (although not iOS yet). Almost everything I do on my Linux workstation works on Mac too. Windows though is beyond horrible and different in every way.

> I do networking stuff

Me too, but probably very different stuff. I’m doing p2p stuff over tcp and am affected mostly by sock options, buffer sizes, tcp options etc.

[sensanaty]

> Best OS

I like apple hardware, but their OS is fucking atrocious. In the year 2024 it still doesn't have a native volume mixer, or any kind of sensible window management shortcuts. Half the things on it have to be fixed with paid software. Complete joke of an OS, if it were up to me I'd stick a linux distro on top of the hardware and be happy

[seec]

The OS is not a joke since it can do some stuff better than either Windows or Linux can but I completely agree that there are some serious limitations or omissions that should have been fixed.

I think they don't because they have an incentive to not do so: they get a cut on all the software you have to purchase on the App Store to make up for it. It might not look like a lot, but if a large portions of Mac users need to buy a 5-10 bucks app to fix the windows management problems, it becomes serious money at 15-30% cut on millions of purchases...

And this is precisely the problem with Apple today. They are not honest enough to fix or improve the stuff they sell at a very high price, both because they sell it anyway and because they put in place many incentives for themselves to not do so.

There is the running meme of the iPad calculator but macOS could also use some care on the calculator/grapher not having received serious attention in decades. At the price they sell their stuff that would seem like a given, but considering they'll make money on the apps you buy to improve that situation, they'll never do so.

After using Apple App Stores for so many years, I wish I didn't, the convenience really isn't worth the cost down the road...