[juancn]

I ended up getting two (one for each of my daughters).

The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.

It really just works.

They have used Windows and Linux before (my kids and wife, that is), but something is always not quite right and needs my involvement.

These days gone 100% Mac, my interventions are usually initial setup and whenever the Samsung printer jams.

[RZelaya]

Once the Apple Silicon Macs came out, I converted my whole family from PC to Mac because the price to performance finally made sense.

I'm the resident tech support for my family and some friends, so having them all playing in the Mac ecosystem made it way easier.

My mom's fiance had a $3,000 Windows laptop for doing video editing. And I convinced him to get a $600 base M1 Mac Mini when they were new and he has never gone back. He just upgraded to an M4 Mac Mini last year

I'm sure these new MacBook Neo's are converting a whole other wave of users that have that price point as their cap but need something mobile.

[porridgeraisin]

The price thing is really true.

My current laptop i got at 48000 INR student discount (retailer at 65000) (the older HP Pavilion Aero 13inch). It's great 950g, 16gb ram, etc etc. still works well. this was many years ago. During this time macbooks were 90000 INR, and M1 was just coming out.

Now the next era of laptops are all 1 lakh NR. Including the windows ones. Importantly, the mac is still 1 lakh.

So it makes no sense for me to get an Asus zenbook or whatever.

Now, I daily drive linux and I hated macos when I used it at work. But it makes no sense whenever I think of upgrading my laptop, to get anything other than an M4 at 90000. If the latest in windows land was 65000, I would go for it. So I'm just waiting for the panther lake machines which are really good from what I've heard to become more mainstream and more devices to have them, including non-top-end ones, and I would pay 1L+ for those.

For anyone else without my aversion to macos, I just recommended Mac M4 the midnight blue ones, they all love it aesthetically and functionally. And it's always on "discount" on Amazon India as well.

Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.

[osigurdson]

It hurts, but I'll pay a premium for worse hardware that will run Linux. But for others in my family Macbooks are just far better value by a wide margin than Windows laptops. Vertical integration really wins these days.

[fundad]

This seems to be key. People must want Windows or Linux so badly they will pay 25-30% for a thinkpad with a track pad that is almost as good. Don't these manufacturers sell more machines than Apple and could benefit from better economies of scale. Maybe the scale is just at the low end and the iPhone subsidizes premium Mac hardware.

I have yet to read about someone who priced out something "as good" as the MacBook Air in terms of component quality and efficiency. What would the price premium be... over 50%?

Either way it costs money to avoid macOS at the higher end but not much when you’re spending thousands of US dollars.

[stodor89]

> People must want Windows or Linux so badly they will pay 25-30% for a thinkpad

Yup, I got Thinkpad X9, the idea being "Air 15 but with Windows". It does the job. I still think Air 15 is better (and cheaper), but the software compatibility and not needing to switch platforms outweighs that.

[fundad]

I love my 15 Air (M2). I’m curious how the Air 15 is better in a way that may or may not be available as an upgrade in the X9 or some other option.

[extraduder_ire]

I've been wondering for a while, how much of macos can you strip out and still run a VM with something like linux in it?

Ideally passing through as much of the hardware as possible, and booting right into that config. Running it natively is ideal, but projects like Asahi are forced to play catch up porting another OS to new devices.

[osigurdson]

Probably as good as that can get is something like WSL. Microsoft put a lot into that but still not the same as just using Linux. I wish Apple / MS would do the opposite and build their OS on top of Linux but of course that will never happen.

[porridgeraisin]

Yeah, I'm waiting for the panther lake (or similar) ones to become mainstream and I'll get a higher end laptop with those next. The latest framework once they open their parts marketplace in india is my first choice for now.

[rconti]

For anyone else for whom the context clues were not enough, 1 lakh NR = 100,000INR

> The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully.

This is a really interesting insight! Never would have thought of that.

[nixass]

> The price thing is really true.

No price tag can make me use insufferable MacOS, the same as iOS.

[anoncow]

Agreed. For programming , Linux > Mac, but Mac > Windows.

[Insanity]

Using both Linux (at home) and Mac (at work), the differences are small for development. But my dev stack is basically just Neovim & CLI tools.

That said, I’ll never work on Windows. 15ish years ago I did some .net work. C# was a fun language but development on windows is a special kind of torture.

[hurril]

Anything in particular that your Linux experience adds over what is available on macOS?

[happymellon]

There was another article, I think it was the Dell making a MacBook Neo competitor, but it came up about second hand Macs not costing a lot now either.

Presumably because the Neo sets a new low price boundary, used M1s Macbook Airs are only a couple of hundred pounds. For a system that is still really competitive.

[leokennis]

I bought my parents a M1 iMac in 2021. Connected a drive to it for Time Machine. Set up an admin account and wrote its password on a sticky note. Set up auto update. Gave a 5 minute instruction.

I haven’t had to look at it for 5 years now. It’s still 200% more powerful than what they need.

As a “power user” Apple’s recent output has been frustrating. But for casual users it’s an unbeatable ecosystem.

[whateverboat]

I'm probably one of the few people who prefer Linux+KDE stack over macbook software ecosystem. But hardware wise, macbooks are just blowing other laptops out of water after M3-M4.

It's not that mac have become much better but that the rest of the lapto pindustry has just gone to shit: 1. Windows pulling more and more shenanigans 2. Normal laptop hardware becoming as pricey as Mac. I could get much better performance as a Linux user from a 1000 Euro laptop that Mac had no alternative for under 2000 Euros. But today, worse performance Linux/Windows laptops are more expensive than Mac. 3. Linux has become much better but the hardware support for laptop is still being bottlenecked by all money going to Windows support. Also, linux has a application ecosystem problem.

I love linux and use it as much as possible. I had a Macbook in 2015-2023 but I preferred linux laptops then. But this year, I had to switch to a new laptop and got a Mac and it is definitely much better than anything on the market just hardware wise.

Software wise I still prefer KDE+Linux.

[baq]

Indeed there aren’t many of us, but macOS is easily the worst part of the Mac experience, and worryingly it’s getting comparatively worse vs kde or even gnome each year. ‘It’s POSIX’ doesn’t cut it when I deploy to Linux and I work in containers all day anyway (and wsl is better than macOS at this, too, but the rest of windows went downhill real bad recently).

The problem is even before the rampocalypse it just wasn’t possible to get hardware of MacBook quality at any price unless it was an Apple box and nowadays Macs are downright cheap.

[thewebguyd]

Thats my problem. I only tolerate macOS, because of the hardware & battery life. WSL is a better *nix dev env than macOS, at least its real Linux, but like you said, the rest of windows sucks still.

I just want a macbook pro, but Linux. I want the performance, thermals, silence, fantastic screen, touchpad, speakers, etc. I refused to give anything up the mac hardware offers, and the PC OEM industry has just chosen, time and time again, to not bother to compete.

Hopefully these new Nvidia laptops will run Linux, that surface ultra is the first time I feel like a laptop on the other side of the fence will finally offer hardware parity.

[F7F7F7]

My home runs on Linux and my life/career runs on Mac OS.

I look forward to tinkering and tweaking my home lab but I barely remember my interactions with Mac OS. I like it that way.

It surely beats tinkering with my life.

[baq]

I’m not saying I want tinkering. I’m saying the macOS desktop environment is worse than kde or gnome for work. I definitely don’t include the setting up the box part in that, macOS on Mac is hard to beat here.

[DanielHB]

Is WSL better for running containers? I find macos really annoying when dealing with containers, especially first setup.

It is baffling to me how many backend devs who work with containers all day don't understand that using containers on mac (and windows) requires a full-blown virtual machine. While in linux you just run them.

[baq]

Much better IME, especially if you keep all development inside the wsl vm, too (which there is no reason to not do).

[DanielHB]

Ah right, WSL is already a linux VM so there is no need to run docker inside a VM again. I suppose one can do all dev work in macos inside a VM too which would achieve similar results, but I never seen anyone do that.

[shaunkoh]

FWIW I run real linux VMs on my Mac with Lima. Only limitation is that it can’t use the GPU. Otherwise works great for me. Is WSL functionally equivalent?

[bel8]

WSL supports GPU passthrough.

[raspasov]

I think the laptop hardware pre Apple M chips was just terrible and has pretty much stayed that way. There’s a reason why Apple moved away from Intel.

Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha.

With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.

[DanielHB]

Gaming on Linux is also way better than mac since Proton became a big thing.

I too prefer Linux + KDE, overall it has been cause _less_ problems than macOS for me and I like the extra customizability.

The only thing keeping my work computer a mac is that I need to run iOS simulators.

[rbanffy]

Apart from the GUI environment, the Mac is a Unix and I find it hard to notice much difference between it and a Linux. I use MacPorts on my Macs and there is no drama with command line tools.

On my work Mac I don’t have sudo and I still could install MacPorts with zero issues.

[DanielHB]

sed has different syntax on macos because macos is based on BSD.

Really annoying to get a ticket "fix this build script for macos" and it is freaking sed compatibility issues.

edit: to be fair that happened once, but it was annoying

[rbanffy]

MacPorts provides GNU equivalents to the native BSD ones. You can always check if there is a `gsed` binary and use it (or check the OS, but checking direct behavior is always best).

But yes, macOS is a Unix, not a Linux.

[frollogaston]

Then you run into Mac scripts expecting the BSD ones when you installed GNU. Similar issue with changing shell to bash.

[2muchcoffeeman]

I used Linux for a long time. I still prefer it. But I can’t justify the extra work. Last time I tried to move back to Linux, I spent far too long admiring the machine. This was only 5 years ago.

[vitorbaptistaa]

AI agents are incredibly useful in this regard. Omarchy even releases some skills, so anything you want to configure is just a matter of asking the agent to do it.

Of course, it would've been better not to need it in the first place. However the experience is much better now (and Omarchy is great!)

[2muchcoffeeman]

I shouldn’t need an agent to configure it.

Is this the new “just compile it from source”?

[pdimitar]

You do not in fact need an agent. Without it, you'll just need more time to inform/educate yourself and do it yourself.

Agents in this case are just accelerators.

[alsetmusic]

Agreed. I've setup many VPS servers. I've configured both Apache and NGINX by hand. It's the sort of thing that I only do sometimes, therefore I have to look up docs each time.

This year, I wanted to run an experiment that was extremely low stakes. I had CC ssh into a VPS and do everything for me. It worked.

Did it have any security gaps? I don't know, I didn't audit. It didn't matter. It was a personal project that had no personal data to risk and the project lasted ~1month (I'd actually audit if I was keeping it). I saw no signs that my server became a bot, fwiw.

I've had agents figure out git repos that were interesting to me but not worth putting in effort on my own. Not things I depend on, just things that I otherwise wouldn't have tested. It's too bad the subsidized pricing is coming to an end. There's a lot that I wouldn't have bothered doing myself that was cheap to have an agent do that won't be worth it again. I'll try out a fraction of the stuff by hand like before and that's fine, but it was a fun ~six months.

[epolanski]

I have an M3 ultra and a coworker got a Linux laptop with Omarchy which blows my machine. Don't remember the hardware.

Needless to say my M3 also sucks compared to a very good desktop.

[runjake]

Depends on the workload.

The M3 Ultra is no slouch. It sits at the top with best processors on both single-core and multi-core x64 processors.

Meanwhile my mini PC with a Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, which is nowhere near an M3 Ultra, feels much snappier using it as a day to day desktop in both Linux and Windows. I think this speaks more to the sluggishness of the macOS experience rather than hardware performance.

But, then I start doing something data/gpu/local LLM intensive and my M3 Max shines.

[thewebguyd]

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.

This is true in business/enterprise IT also. Any big company that's done a switch, or at least offered an employee choice, almost immediately saw a huge drop in help desk workload from mac users.

Legacy win32 apps aside, it's baffling to me that Windows is still the dominant share of computers issued to employees at nearly every non-tech company.

[Drunk_Engineer]

Enterprise Mac still has occasional problems -- mainly due to Microsoft crapware IT departments insist on installing.

[kristianp]

Microsoft or giant piles of poo like crowdstrike?

[mikestorrent]

Crowdstrike is not what is slowing down my Mac. Web pages in Firefox that somehow take up 1GB of RAM are.

[mywittyname]

Por qué no los dos?

[baq]

Ask serious security folks at serious orgs if they can afford to not run crowdstrike regardless of OS.

[michaelt]

Can any serious security folks at serious orgs confirm they can't afford not to run crowdstrike?

[HDBaseT]

We don't deploy Crowdstrike to our Macs. (Small org, 500~ Macs).

[UltraSane]

The alternative it a strict zero trust network design with very internet access only via RDP or similar protocols. Not many companies are willing to do this.

[Suppafly]

Enterprise Mac is a bit of a contradiction because Apple doesn't really make enterprise tools, you still end up joining them to a windows network and using windows file sharing and printing.

[duckmysick]

What's the proper way of managing Mac endpoints?

[thewebguyd]

Any modern MDM like Jamf, Kandji, Mosyle, etc. + the identity/IAM of your choice (most commonly Entra or Okta)

[oneplane]

Since SIP, it's MDM with DDM and you can basically leave engineers be local admins as it has no impact on the system state anymore.

[robterrell]

JAMF is popular. I've heard of Kandji too.

[prmoustache]

A company CTO told me once that he was a linux user at home but windows was the only option from a soc2 auditing point of view as MacOs faired barely better than linux in the fleet device management area.

[jonathaneunice]

Not true. Macs easily pass SOC 2 audits.

You'll need MDM, installed anti-virus/anti-malware, and reasonable update policies, as with any endpoint. But have passed multiple years' audits with mostly-macOS fleet.

[vablings]

RHEL has support for SOC2 requirements. RHEL is also very nice in general

[infecto]

Part of that reason is Microsoft office is a third class citizen on macOS.

Edit: Not sure why this would get downvoted. Weird. It absolutely lags behind windows version of the products by years. Excel did not get ribbon key shortcuts until 6 months ago. It’s a pretty terrible experience for most power users.

[prmoustache]

Many companies nowadays only provide the most basic office license with only web access to office apps for most of their employees. So for those that puts all OS at the same level.

Having said that software lagging in versions/features doesn't mean users are less efficient using the older tool. Are todays office users more efficient in word and excel with the ribbon than they were using office97 a few decades ago? Has it been measured? I know I am still lost whenever I need to find something on the ribbon.

[infecto]

Sure if you are a basic user it’s no issue. Basic being someone using 1% of the feature set. The moment you start developing any skills in office there is an actual difference in the product. Like I already said, MacOS did not have ribbon shortcuts until a few months ago. That’s simply insulting that such a core function for users would be missing.

[prmoustache]

The ribbon is a UI providing a way to access functions, not a core function in itself.

[infecto]

Are we arguing if ribbon shortcuts are not a core function?? I don’t know why we are even going down this road but… for any user that has moderate level of use in excel, the keyboard shortcuts are used so heavily that they absolutely become a core function to the use of the platform. Power users in finance may even go to the extreme of popping out certain key caps on their keyboard to reduce mistakes and maximize their efficiency.

[bdamm]

How? My experience with Excel, Word, Powerpoint, event Teams, is that they generally work fine. This is unlike the situation from e.g. 20 years ago, when you could barely get work done due to all the crashes, but that is a very distant memory now. There was a brief time during 2019 when Teams on Mac was kind of awful, but that's long ago in the past as well.

My biggest complaint these days is that Teams uses far too much CPU when I'm sharing my screen. But other than that, everything seems to be ok.

[mountain_peak]

People might not remember, but Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were all released for the Macintosh before Windows. Back then, the Macintosh versions were 1st-class citizens and (and you mention), Windows versions were a buggy mess.

Having used versions on both for years, I'd say there was a "dark" time around 2011 when the macOS versions were lagging badly feature-wise, but they're pretty much on-par today.

My biggest complaint is that you can't turn off the ridiculous animations in macOS versions (e.g. moving between cells in Excel). That makes the entire suite "feel" slower when in reality, the macOS version could easily be just as responsive as the Windows suite.

[storus]

They still aren't on-par today, in MacOS Excel you can't do some charts you can do on Windows.

[pseudosavant]

I can't speak for Teams (that is just an Electron app), but all of the legacy Mac Office apps are still a subset of the capabilities of their Windows counterparts.

If you can't tell the difference between Google Sheets and Excel, you probably won't notice the difference between Mac and Windows Excel. But if you are in some role like finance where you spend a ton of time in Excel, the gaps become obnoxiously noticeable. Especially because VBA is completely non-existent on Mac.

[havaloc]

What's sad is that in my experience supporting 80 users, Word et al work with fewer issues on Mac. The stack integration on Windows is fine, until it isn't.

[infecto]

Lack of parity. It’s getting better but my classic example is ribbon shortcuts for Excel. They did not exist until something like 6 months ago.

[ramgine]

Anecdotal but I’m a sysadmin in the IT dept in my rather larger company and have zero issues with office on my daily driver m2 Mac Pro. On my Dell precision running win 11 I constantly have issues with outlook, teams, etc.

[infecto]

Cannot speak to bugs but purely functionality. Historically speaking the macOS products lag by years.

[a1o]

I don’t know why you are getting downvoted, agree with you, Microsoft Office is awful on macOS, it just doesn’t work the same, has awful integration with Sharepoint (and Sharepoint in MS Teams and OneDrive), and continuously forgets its properly licensed and complains with a big message that it isn’t licensed - sometimes downgrading to read only. It’s just a terrible thing to use.

[trimethylpurine]

Mac users are consistently the highest needs users in my environment. Ymmv. Samba is still broken. Microsoft apps don't work.

You can use them for Adobe. But even then, performance per dollar is poor. Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

I'm the Director of IT for a 160M revenue company.

We allow Macs, and we support them. But I don't share your take on the benefits. I can't think of a single benefit frankly. It's a loss for the business.

Oh well, it's not my money.

[thewebguyd]

This reads like the last time you've evaluated is 2018. The entire office suite works great on Apple silicon with the exception of, obviously Win32 VBA macros and some PowerQuery features in Excel.

As for Adobe, I'm assuming you're issuing desktops then? Because for an equivalently performant laptop with heavy Adobe workloads you are going to spend the same as a MBP on the higher end Thinkpads, or dell precisions. There's no cost savings there, really (again, unless you have everyone on desktops).

If you're still domain joining macs, trying to use SCCM & GPOs, and treating them like any other windows endpoint, of course you are running into problems. Kind of a square peg/round hole situation.

Not doubting your experience, but to have relatively problem free mac endpoints you have to do things differently. Maybe not worth it for every company, especially any that are super deep into Microsoft. But I can say, they've worked great for mine and we are phasing out Windows entirely, and IBM, Cisco, and SAP all had similar lower total cost of ownership & less help desk workload after introducing macs. Then again, we no longer use smb/samba, we eliminated on-prem file shares a long time ago.

[trimethylpurine]

We use 10G fiber to a local file store. Not domain joined. Cloud is way too slow for media production (the users that Apple targets).

We use basic AV and monitoring, as required for carrying insurance.

We don't have any desktops.

Our comparisons are done regularly to show the difference to new employees and to ensure that we aren't biased in what we report for budgeting.

[kalleboo]

I have a friend who runs a video production company. He was a big PC guy, they used desktop tower PCs with power-hungry GPUs for editing. He recently switched them over to Macs after testing Premiere on the base-model Mac mini they got for the receptionist and finding it was on par with their expensive PCs. His M3 Max MacBook Pro runs their chroma key at twice the speed of the GPU in the previous editing PC, AI upscaling is the same speed despite being a laptop. Premiere is also far more stable on the Mac, he's spent days troubleshooting driver versions on the PC.

[grosswait]

Was that side by side comparison with all the security cruft running, because this is totally contrary to my experience with both sets of hardware managed by IT.

[trimethylpurine]

You have to have security software on both Mac and Windows machines in an enterprise. It's required to carry insurance.

[frollogaston]

Not surprising. I've used Macs since 2005, and 3P software and GPU support have always been weak points. People blame the lack of popularity, but macOS is inherently a moving target to support. You're talking about corp machines running Adobe software with GPU acceleration, so yeah. Only reason I might do that on a Mac is if it's my personal machine and I want it to be nice for other stuff, but it wouldn't be cheap.

[ksec]

>Adobe flies on much cheaper Windows hardware in the side by side testing we've done.

This is the first time I have ever heard Adobe files on Windows.

There were a period of time between 2015 - 2020 that might have been the case. Especially due to poor Intel GPU acceleration on Mac.

Since Apple Silicon, Adobe Apps on Mac has been constantly faster than Windows counterparts. With plenty of examples on Youtube and Reddit when people disocver it. I mean Adobe work best on Mac I thought was given, given the historic ties between the two.

[trimethylpurine]

These are new. The Macs are faster if you use regular Windows out of the box with all the bloat. But that's not what businesses do.

Put any kind of security software on the Mac and remove the bloat from Windows (normal for enterprises), and the Windows machines are faster.

You can blame the security software if you like, but you have to have it to carry insurance. And you have to have it to make a fair comparison anyway.

It's obvious that they will be faster. They come with a free video card at the same price point as the Macs that don't.

[thewebguyd]

Which security software matters greatly. If its poorly optimized, and doesn't use Apple's framework it's going to perform terribly (SentinelOne is notorious for this) , and by default with smb on mac it will scan every single file modification over the network. If you're working with huge files over smb you have to disable packet signing, make sure the mac isn't writing and looking for .DS_Store, and make sure directory caching is turned on (its off by default).

Your experience is valid, I don't doubt that, but you can't just toss a mac into a windows optimized environment and expect it to work, you have to take that extra bit of time to do things differently.

Either way, sounds like you made the right choice then for your own org, but for the vast majority of companies introducing macs generally aren't a loss and tend to have a higher ROI.

[trimethylpurine]

Which security software do you recommend?

I'm going to run your recommendations through some research tomorrow. It would be so cool if we can get local file sharing to work, even Mac to Mac would be amazing.

We have directories with 30k+ large images and video content that we need to share. Macs can't open them.

[trimethylpurine]

Also, thanks in advance for any advice, if it works.

[bigstrat2003]

It's much harder to manage Macs than Windows machines, especially if you are a Windows shop already (which most are). Microsoft is working on eroding the quality of their software, but for now the management tools they offer for Windows clients are simply unparalleled in the Mac world.

[thewebguyd]

Sure, if you're still on-prem AD or hybrid. For orgs that have already moved to full Intune/EntraID, managing windows via Intune is still years behind a good macOS MDM. InTune still feels half baked.

[vondur]

Not really the case any longer. JAMF is pretty easy to use and it's way better to work with compared to Intune, which to me feels half baked compared to something like on Prem AD/GP/SCCM.

[elorant]

There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable. Apple won’t even give you a PCie slot on its $10k mac studio ultra to install a better network card or whatever.

[cortesoft]

I haven't worked with TOO many different companies, but I have worked at a few of various sizes (from small startup to huge Fortune 100), and none of them ever provided upgrades for machines. It was always full replacements. Sometimes you would get a used machine, but they were from someone else who left, not an upgraded machine.

Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?

[themadturk]

As a recent retiree from a Fortune 500 company...no, there's no such thing as an upgrade. We were virtually exclusively laptops on the desktop. It was full replacement every time.

[thewebguyd]

> Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?

I doubt it. I'm certainly not, and none of my peers at other companies locally are either. Even less so now that plenty of business class laptops are coming with soldered ram anyway. The MO is to just replace the machine once its out of warranty.

[michaelt]

It's not common, but it's not unusual either.

If your standard developer laptop has a 256 GB SSD, but a certain team needs more disk space due to the work they're doing, you can just add a second nvme for a fraction of the cost and inconvenience of replacing the whole laptop.

[spankibalt]

> "Are other IT shops really doing a lot of piece by piece upgrades for employee machines?"

My experiences cover only Europe, mostly in sasec (safety and security, not infosec) shops, including sasec-related engineering and product development. The only Macs I see in any pro capacity are those of clients and rent-a-lecturer/instructor-types, the latter seldomly part of the industry. In my neck of the woods we run mostly on machines from Panasonic and Lenovo; in-house repair labs are a thing (some of them with expertise and equipment that makes the Rechenzentren at the local universities bow their heads in shame).

What a lot Apple people don't seem to get into their heads is that there's user segments to whom the virtues of Apple's "silicon" is utterly irrelevant; the small benefits you'd get out of it are completely negated by a litany of cons that makes their products completely undesirable.

[fragmede]

It's for specialist users. Eg video editors or CAD systems. They need a 10-Gig connectivity to the SAN and want a Mac and not a Dell.

[reaperducer]

There’s nothing baffling to it. Windows PCs are upgradable.

We're talking about enterprises here, not home tinkerers.

Enterprises buy whole computers and replace them every x years. They don't waste expensive IT employee time running around upgrading machines all the time.

The last time I worked for a company that did any repair of its computers was around 2005, when all ~500 Dells in the office had to have their defective motherboards replaced.

[ioblomov]

There’s an accounting factor too. Businesses depreciate equipment as SOP. The laptops have already been written off by the time they need upgrading.

[Kirby64]

What company upgrades their windows PCs? They give them exactly as shipped. IT department is not wasting time swapping out RAM or SSDs. And they certainly are not upgrading them over time. You just replace the entire PC if you go to 'swap' it.

[msisk6]

I work for a little company called Boeing and all our PCs (desktops and laptops) are Dell and our IT center will upgrade SSD, memory, and even do repairs like swapping out motherboards.

Probably helps the IT center folks are actually employees of Dell and this service is part of the deal Boeing has with Dell. Lots of big companies have similar deals with their hardware vendors.

[Kirby64]

Interesting. I’ve worked for company’s that were all Dell shops as well and were similarly large and they had no such deal. You got whatever PC was available (like two options, one large and one small) and no choice beyond that. If you were special and could adequately plead your case, you maybe got a desktop for the extra RAM which was special order.

Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.

[msisk6]

A month or so back I was hanging out at the IT center waiting for my laptop to be re-imaged (my Windows bootloader went "missing or invalid") when an engineer brought his laptop in to be upgraded from 16GB to 32GB. The IT tech took it in the back, did the job, and brought it back out in about 10 minutes.

I think part of the problem is all our laptops have smart card slots on them, and that limits the available options.

[prmoustache]

> Why would you even want a SSD or memory upgrade? By the time you’re out of memory, the cpu upgrade is typically worth it.

Not necessarily. Sometimes the default laptop sizing comes with a standard usage in mind but more space and ram is justified for other roles. Sure you could have different laptop models but if you are fine with just more ram and disk space why not?

[prmoustache]

I have had an upgrade maxing out the memory of my works thinkpad. It was a number of years ago, 2020 or 2021. Might be less common these days for obvious technical reasons (solderd ram on many models) but if the hardware allows it why not?

[kyawzazaw]

my school IT department does this but it's a small university

[0x1d7]

IME edu operates much differently than [US] corporations which use a 3 - 5 year deprecation schedule. Edu is more 'run it until it doesn't'.

[kasey_junk]

I have never, in 30 years, working across big companies and small, had a computer hardware upgrade. It’s _always_ just a new box.

[Modified3019]

I work I Ag retail (agronomic services, chemical sales) and while we have an IT department, a decade ago I’d occasionally act as “local” tech support and double a coworker’s RAM when their combination of browser/office/database front ends stopped gracefully fitting in 4GB (and later 8GB). I would also migrate them from HDD’s to SSD’s, and set them up with backups.

But even I haven’t done that in several years now, once IT moved to providing 16GB memory and SSD’s as a baseline, there’s really nothing left in a box to upgrade. I’m quite happy enough to not have to care.

[zdragnar]

Something as simple as adding a stick of RAM might be worthwhile, but some upgrades will take more money in salary (you and the person whose computer you're working on) than the upgrade is actually worth. This is especially true if you replace several components one at a time in a what would otherwise be a single replace cycle.

This is especially true if the business is writing down the replaced hardware as depreciated capital, compared to say simply adding a stick of RAM.

[tom_]

I've generally been given additional decent-performance storage every year or two when working in video games, fairly reliably the case since 2000, seemingly regardless of company size. Somehow each new project would always require yet more working space (again), and projects would often overlap to some extent.

Aside from that, almost always a new PC - almost! When times haven't been so good, I've had spot upgrades.

All of the above is just a question of running the numbers and minimising for cost, I'm sure.

[havaloc]

Agreed, the only time I did upgrades on boxes is swapping out spinning disks for SSD, that saved me a whole upgrade cycle it was such an improvement.

[j2j8]

They are often leased and have to be returned in the same condition at the end of the term.

[robertlagrant]

Most people have laptops now, in my experience of large corporations.

[recursive]

I got the RAM upgraded in my work laptop.

[airstrike]

Last time I requested that, they just swapped my laptop for a newer one with more RAM

[Hugsbox]

On very rare occasions I may do that for a user, if I happen to have extra RAM on hand from - for example - a broken machine. But by and large it's just going to be a whole machine upgrade.

[recursive]

I mean, I had to install it myself.

[GeekyBear]

I actually have seen a business upgrade PCs that were fairly recently purchased once, back during the transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.

[sgt]

I figured this out around 2005. Get your entire company on Mac, get your entire family on Mac. Your life will have zero support calls, maybe outside of the intial "How do I install an app" which seems to confuse some people.

[wil421]

The desktop support people agreed at my last job said MACs was more expensive upfront but less hardware faults and RMA for devices that were dead on delivery. They also had less support calls after new users learned the platform. The business said hell no we would rather pay less upfront.

[havaloc]

Now Mac is almost the same if not cheaper up front, and in the long run too. It's a wild thing to see.

[commandersaki]

I think Apple's era of unreliable laptops were the ones with Butterfly keyboards. So many issues back then, but they did a complete 180 once they reintroduced the magic keyboard and then Apple Silicon.

[raspasov]

Apple Intel laptop + a butterfly keyboard was the absolute gutter tier experience. Not only it was slow and ran hot, but after a few months a random key would get stuck and stop working.

[frollogaston]

Also touch bar, also was all USB-C at a time when there was 0 adoption (2016). I went out of my way to buy a 2015 model instead, held up for 10 years.

[wil421]

I was gifted a Touch Bar and bought an M1 air when they came out. It was a night a day difference. Fan speed and throttling killed the experience and Touch Bar was not good.

[sgt]

I agree that sucked, and I fixed a few of them myself instead of sending to Apple. Got quite good at it.

[lobf]

Yup. Around 2005 my 83 year old grandpa decided he wanted to learn how to use a computer.

I told him to just get a Mac- it’s a little more expensive but the user experience is unparalleled, and the Genius Bar offers (do they still?) classes in using your computer if needed.

Never had to help him with buggy software, crashes, etc. It just worked.

[sgt]

My grandmother - at 104, was still rocking her iPad! Sending / receiving emails, doing FaceTime, reading the news.

[recursive]

I got my first ipad a year or two ago. It took me many tries over about an hour to setup the apple account I needed to log in to the device. I wish I had documented the process, because it's so different than what people typically claim about Apple ease of use.

[Insanity]

Interesting experience. I set up 2 iPad pros, basically one shot experience that took a few minutes.

Even the first one I owned was straightforward

[kstrauser]

Some older relatives asked for a computer recommendation. I told them a thousand reasons why a MacBook Air (at that moment) would be perfect for them. They went to Best Buy and came home with the Dellpaq thing that the guy there told them had better specs.

Honestly, it kinda let me off the hook. "Sorry, I don't know the first thing about Windows[0]. But if you have questions, I'm sure the Best Buy fella will be happy to walk you through it." They never have liked the dumb thing since they got it, but hey, I did my best to lead that horse to water.

[0]I do, but they don't know that, and anyone who tells them's getting throatpunched.

[sgt]

The worst thing about those cheaper "Best Buy" Windows machines is that they're heavily laden with all kinds of software making the PC extremely slow from the start. I just don't understand who they can get away with it.

[nozzlegear]

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me.

Same here. Whenever a family member asks which kind of device they should buy, I just tell them to get the Apple device. They're going to come to me if they ever need help with it, and that happens an order of magnitude less with Apple stuff. Plus, I don't even know how to do anything in Windows anymore myself.

[xp84]

They added a second right-click menu in Explorer now. IDK if this is Windows 11 or if 10 had this. When you right-click a file, you get a shorter menu with a larger font. But it might not have the option you want -- you have to click "Show more options" at the bottom. Then it lags for 1 second (this is a Core Ultra 9 with 64GB of RAM btw) and opens a new one, with the old font metrics, and that one also has all the things the original ones did.

This was clearly greenlit by the same guy who signed off on the Settings "App" but didn't want to take the time to redo ALL the settings, or even half of them, so now, for like 60% of the possible tasks you might need to do, you just drill in, clicking random "Advanced" buttons until you finally get to the Vista-era window.

I'm the first one to blast the Mac "Settings App" as trash -- poorly-designed, and worse than what it replaced in every way. But I have to admit, we've got it easy compared to Windows settings.

[gopher_space]

If I'm using my old laptop with a slow CPU I get to see Win 11 draw an older GUI I recognize and then cover it with whatever they're doing now.

[Thlom]

I'm on win11 at work and when I right click in explorer it loads the normal menu but then immediately populates the menu with more options. It takes just long enough before it populates more options for you to maybe click on something which has then moved to somewhere else. Extremely annoying.

[juancn]

At least setting search works and every single setting has a command line version too.

[Danox]

That has been my experience too with family, and most people outside of tech circles don't even know about butterfly keyboards I never heard a peep during that time.

[jmyeet]

As a fellow family IT specialist, about a decade ago I took the stance that if it's not Apple, I'm not fixing it. I'm not dealing with some bullshit issue with weird proprietary drivers or crapware. The straw that broke the camel's back was a Dell laptop that wasn't working with the Wifi until I turned off IPv6.

It's also why I don't use Linux for a desktop unless I have to. I've had years of debugging weird issues with drivers, editing /etc files, changing X settings and so on.

MacOS isn't perfect. In fact, I think Apple keeps making it worse because they have no real product vision now and it's just a bunch of teams making local changes to justify their own existence. But you can look at MacOS in one of two ways: as a better Windows (by having a UNIX-like core) or as a better Linux (by having a better UI subsystem). Either way it's a win (IMHO).

I'm torn on the Macbook Neo, personally. It really is just a giant iPhone 18 with a keyboard. Plus you can get a Macbook Air at times for $900. That's $200 more than the high-end Neo. Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.

[Telaneo]

> Like is it that different to a (cheaper) iPad, which you can also get a keyboard for? I guess it's just not for me.

For anything that's not pure consumption, that's a massive upgrade. A proper keyboard makes a world of difference. You don't need it if all you do is browse and view, and you can manage if you only need to send an email here and there, but I'd never want to program or write longer texts (emails, essays, spreadsheets for that matter) on an iPad, even if I hooked up a keyboard, unless I'm desperate and have no other options.

[themadturk]

The MacBook Air is a better machine, but the Neo is far better than an iPad because MacOS isn't constrained like iPadOS is. The Neo can't really be compared to an iPad for that reason alone.

[tim333]

It's very different to an ipad and keyboard because of the software being a proper OS rather than a phone one. I was a bit torn on Neo vs Air though - the Air's a bit cooler looking.

[Version467]

Yup. Basically the same story here.

There’s lots of stuff not to like about macOS, but there’s something about it that makes it click much more for average people.

For my partner in particular I noticed that they use way more features than they ever did with windows. Boring stuff like spotlight search to find files, space bar to preview documents, airdrop to send stuff to an iPhone, etc.

With windows I got called over constantly for questions like “how do I find x, I forgot where I put it”, “can you help me get this on my phone, I want to send it to <friend>”.

It’s not like good solutions for this don’t exist elsewhere, but something about MacBooks make people better at discovering those features.

I have secret pet theory that part of it is actually just that people know about Apple stuff that it’s supposed to be intuitive and so they have more confidence in trying to figure it out, which makes them have more success at it and that turns into a positive cycle.

[adjejmxbdjdn]

I’ve faced far more issues with relatives with Macs than when they had Linux.

The key with Linux was giving them an LTS Ubuntu but not messing with it at all.

The problem with macOS recently has been that it keeps changing how things work which would result in the relatives messing around and messing up the system.

Ubuntu has been pretty rock solid and reliable, while not changing anything drastically enough to lead them to try and mess with it.

[wl]

I recently had an experience with a family member's Ubuntu LTS machine where it was stuck on an old release, /etc/apt/sources.list needed to be edited because of Ubuntu's obnoxious habit of breaking old repositories, and then I needed to debug apt issues to get do-release-upgrade to actually work.

The Macs and iPads have their own problems, but nothing like that.

[imp0cat]

But how old exactly?

https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle

The 16.04 is still supported and it was released in 2016! So it must have been an even older system, right?

[fragmede]

Eh. You just install codex or Claude code and tell it to fix it for you.

[pdimitar]

Hell, you can install the gemini/antigravity CLI and use Gemini's free tiers and it will still fix it for you.

[juancn]

The issue is when it updates.

The moment it runs an update all bets are off. It's always audio for me, it breaks in the weirdest ways.

Mac updates are the best in the industry, period.

Close to zero chance of having an issue (unless you're messing with third-party kernel extensions).

[b212]

Sounds nearly impossible it took me 3 years to figure out how to properly use my Bluetooth headphones with LTS Ubuntu a few years back. The solution: bought a Mac after 3 years.

There were millions of other annoying small things in Ubuntu itself as well. I’m sorry to say but as much as I love nix systems Ubuntu wasn’t really for general public - maybe it’s better today, not sure. Heard the story over and over again - that it’s superior, and every time I try it I’m utterly disappointed.

[antaviana]

My greatest concern about Mac hardware is that they are perfectly operational by the time software-driven programmed obsolescence comes its way, even when it is a nice problem to have. I have 3 iMacs 27 (2019) which have a gorgeous display, but the lack of software updates to the OS effectively bricks them via enterprise conditional access rules or with the ongoing drop of legacy OS support by key apps. This programmed obsolescence feels as a huge resource waste. It should not be allowed, if anything for environmental reasons.

[robertjpayne]

I'd still say getting 7 years of free OS supports for hardware is pretty incredible. All-in-ones like iMacs are always going to be wasteful on the environmental side of things faster because displays will outlive the usefulness of the rest of it by a large large margin.

At least Apple does try a bit to be a responsible recycler and you can always take your old hardware to them.

[baq]

I have a 2019 GPU in my windows box and I’d be pissed off if it stopped working in the next few years. Computers nowadays are useful for much longer than they used to. Spectre class vulnerabilities which take 50% performance to properly (kinda) mitigate are the only reason to maybe upgrade if all you do is browse facebook and pay bills.

[kalleboo]

7 years is generous for phones but desktop computers have had a much slower performance ramp up where even a 10 year old desktop should be perfectly cromulent for office tasks as long as you give it an SSD and enough RAM.

The sad thing is that newer macOS versions do still work really well on these unsupported machines - OpenCore Legacy Patcher proves it. All Apple would need to do is spend some time testing things, there's nothing to actually implement to make it work.

Isn't Apple supposed to be a services company now anyway, making money off of this installed base with cloud subscriptions?

[taude]

How is the OS Free? It's part of what you pay for.

I have a 11 year old PC -- running Cosmos now, and it's still faster than my hobbled M4 PRO with 48 GB, work mac with all it's corp spyware cruft on it.

We should expect more than 7 years out of all our tech hardware.

EDIT: I say this as a person who spent a couple weekends trying to get various forms of Linux running on a 2017 Macbook Pro, because it was stuck on VEntura.

[bombcar]

In the bad (good?) old days Mac OS X cost money each upgrade.

[Danox]

Once every 2 years or so.

[gt0]

Free OS updates is the norm now though. If you'd bought a Windows PC 7 years ago, or used Linux, or just about any other desktop OS, you'd have had free updates.

[SanDiegoSun]

I guess you forgot about windows TPM controversy. Comments like this make me realize a good majority have no idea what they are talking about and still decide to voice an uninformed opinion.

[juancn]

They get updates forever, and even after they're usable anyway.

They even get serious security updates even after that period, and you can install linux if you really want to, but it makes no sense to me.

[Telaneo]

Linux has pretty good support for Macs, since they're so common (the T2 chip made it more annoying, but it's still very possible). That said, it's still Linux, for better or worse.

If nothing else, it'd be nice if those iMacs could be reused as external displays, but nope. No display-in on them, so no dice (at least not without a lot of dicking about).

[porridgeraisin]

Another advantage recommending macs to my relatives... The apple branding and the sleek look makes them treat it much more carefully. An equally expensive less sleek laptop they treat like a fridge. This is really helpful as most problems they ring you up for come from poor maintenance.

[stodor89]

I unironically like the trackpad and keyboard on the Neo better than Air/Pro's.

It's not a perfect laptop, but I promise you people who spend $600 on their computer have never seen anything comparable.

[jimmydddd]

My son had a Mac for college. But then the accounting department gave out assignments that required a PC based software package. And it took quite a while to crunch numbers. So I ended up having to get him a relatively high end PC laptop as well. It turns out the professor had never even used the software before. But, that's the academic world.

[ankurdhama]

For such use cases of running some Windows app on Mac you could have tried https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover

[rishabhd]

I am typing this from a 6 year old m1 macbook, and it is still going strong. I think even with the recent flaws of macos and instability, the hardware is pretty great, and if you don't like something, you can still hack your way through it. No windows for me, the only reason I used to rely on windows was its vast software array, reversing applicability and videogames. Now that good cross platform reversing tools are available, and I have migrated to PS5, macos just makes the most sense to me. I got it for 800 USD 6 years back, and it has already given me more bang for the buck.

[protocolture]

Planning to make my son deal with a broken Debian image.

[greatgib]

I easily guess that it is just that you are used to Mac, so you easily "forget" the common issues that you are usually encountering.

For example, one of the most common example is icloud subtly enabled by default for syncing photo and data, and that will get your mac and iphone stuck in a complicated mess when things get full with the limited free space.

[juancn]

Not really, I've been using linux since the Slackware on diskette era. I know my way around recompiling a kernel (used to do it on a 486).

I also did dev on Windows, I know the internals pretty well (I even did embedded on CE, writing portable code across CE/95/NT family runtimes).

I still prefer Mac, it's much less likely to randomly break, mainly due to the fact that the hardware the software runs on is extremely predictable. I also like the care about muggle usability that Apple tends to pursue (granted, not perfect, but way better than the other two)

[chillfox]

I got my mum onto Apple devices (mac and iPhone) over a decade ago, and support dropped sharply in the first 6 months. These days it's incredibly rare that she needs help with anything, and she does more on the computer than she ever did.

The mac has helped her improve here computer skills and confidence in a way that Windows never did.

[micromacrofoot]

Yeah exactly, one of my kids has a Windows PC for gaming and just logging in to the thing is arduous sometimes... Microsoft's account auth system is so bad with its random redirects. Don't even me get me started on the parental controls, it's probably one of the laggiest systems I use.

[baq]

Let’s not pretend Apple screen time is any good. My 13yo daughter figured out multiple ways around it by herself and googled a few more and if it wasn’t leaking like a sieve it isn’t granular enough anyway (e.g. music apps offering videos - I want to block videos but not music - can’t be done)

[micromacrofoot]

Yeah none of them are great, but Microsoft's is awful

[andriy_koval]

> The thing about Apple is that as the "IT" guy for my family, its ecosystem is the one which needs the least attention from me. > It really just works.

chromebooks likely need even less attention

[danaris]

Well, and so does a chalkboard, but if what they want is a computer...

[xmeadow]

I know what you mean but you will regret your choices Ehen your wife and doughters forget what a wifi-network is.

[drnick1]

Apple and the NSA must know a lot about you.

[bdamm]

What are you saying, that you think Windows or Linux are better platforms for evading covert government oversight?

Let's be totally clear here; if the government is interested in you, your choice of computer platform matters very little in terms of hiding information about your life.

[drnick1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

[bdamm]

What is your point? If anything, PRISM argues that Apple users are more secure; it took the NSA a solid five years longer to work their way into Apple. But at this point, every provider is compromised, every country is compromised, so again - what is your point? The government knows a lot about everyone, it has nothing to do with choice of computing platform.

It is also worth noting that the USA is not the only country collecting data on US persons (and everyone else.)

The question is not, does the USA know about you, the question is really, how many governments know all about you and how does that information manifest in your life?

[drnick1]

> But at this point, every provider is compromised

Yes, and its probably fair to assume that Apple and/or the government can access any of your files on your devices or in the cloud. My suggestion is not to use any "provider." Use free software, and keep your data locally on encrypted drives.

[bdamm]

Unfortunately, that isn't good enough. Any government has a library of exploits in free software, and there are many documented cases of this. Your encrypted files are only as good as the clients that access them, and that's where the weaknesses lie. Along with the traditional aspects of surveillence, of course. "Amateurs hack systems; professionals hack people."

For the vast majority of people, the hassle simply isn't worth it, especially when the massive reduction in convenience is paired with basically no improvement in security.

[Danox]

Linux, Mac OS, and iOS maybe a little but Windows no way you are flapping in the breeze.

[juancn]

Like I care. I'm not that interesting.

[tantalor]

Choosing an OS 101 https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/mx4dni/cho...

It used to be,

> Do you fear technology?

> > Yes

> Is your daddy rich?

> > Yes

> MacOS

I guess we can remove the second question now.

[lowbloodsugar]

"Do you fear technology?" should be "Do you have no fucks to give for all the bullshit?"

I've got Pis and FPGA boards, and a threadripper for fun, but I daily macOs because I've got shit to do.

[frollogaston]

Yes I fear tech, idc

[mezeek]

Ah yes, the classic tech guys on Hacker News that fear technology.

[uticus]

sometimes the wizards know best when to fear magic

[weirdmantis69]

fly... you fools...

[panzagl]

Ah yes, the classic Mac user on Hacker News that thinks they're a tech guy. :-)

[notatoad]

yeah, i think a lot of people on hacker news basically agree with that old meme that says "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."