[ajross]

I won't buy or recommend one just on principle. I've spent way too much of my life advocating for open firmware and user-customizable systems to throw it all in the trash for a few hours of battery. I absolutely tell everyone they're the best, and why, but my daily driver has been a Linux box of some form (OK fine I have a windows rig for gaming too) for decades, and that's not changing.

Also, again, most folks just don't care. And of the remainder:

> Compiles code twice as fast as my new Windows desktop

That's because MS's filesystem layer has been garbage since NT was launched decades ago and they've never managed to catch up. Also if you're not apples/applesing and are measuring native C/C++ builds: VS is an OK optimizer but lags clang badly in build speed. The actual CPU is faster, but not by nearly 2x.

[kstrauser]

>> Compiles code twice as fast as my new Windows desktop

>That's because MS's filesystem layer has been garbage since NT was launched decades ago [...]

I confess that this kind of excuse drives me batty. End users don't buy CPUs and buy filesystems. They buy entire systems. "Well, it's not really that much faster, it's just that part of the system is junk. The rest is comparable!" That may be, but the end result for the person you're talking to is that their Windows PC compiles code at half the speed of their Mac. It's not like they bought it and selected the glacial filesystem, or even had a choice in the matter.

That's right up there with "my Intel integrated graphics gets lower FPS than my Nvidia card." "But the CPU is faster!" Possibly true, but still totally irrelevant if the rest of the system can't keep up.

[aleph_minus_one]

> End users don't buy CPUs and buy filesystems. They buy entire systems. [...] Possibly true, but still totally irrelevant if the rest of the system can't keep up.

At least historically for hardware components of PCs, this was not irrelevant, but the state of things:

You basically bought some PC as a starting basis. Because of the high speed of improvements, everybody knew that you would soon replace parts as you deemed feasible. If some component was not suitable anymore, you swapped it (upgrade the PC). You bought a new PC if things got insanely outdated, and updating was not worth the money anymore. With this new PC, the cycle of updating components started back from the beginning.

[kstrauser]

But that still doesn't save away, "oh, it's only slow because the filesystem is so slow". Assuming that's true, that's a very integral part of the system that can't readily be swapped out by most people. You can't say "the system is actually really fast, it's just the OS that's slow", because the end result is just plain "the system is slow."

[aleph_minus_one]

> You can't say "the system is actually really fast, it's just the OS that's slow", because the end result is just plain "the system is slow."

If performance is so critical, people do find ways around this. Just to give an arbitrary example since you mention file systems:

Oracle implemented their own filesystem (ASM Cluster File System (ACFS)):

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oracle_Cloud_File...

"ACFS provides direct I/O for Oracle database I/O workloads. ACFS implements indirect I/O however for general purpose files that typically perform small I/O for better response time."

[ajross]

> I confess that this kind of excuse drives me batty.

The use case was "compiling code". My assumption was that anyone buying hardware for that application would understand stuff like filesystem performance, system tuning, also stuff like "how to use a ramdisk" or "how to install Linux".

Yes, if you want to flame about the whole system experience: Apple's is the best, period. But not because they're twice as fast, that's ridiculous.