[nawitus]

I bought a 13" MacBook Retina Pro last December as my first Apple laptop after several years of Arch Linux. My expectation was that it would "simply work", whereas Arch often required manual configuration.

My experience hasn't been very positive with the MacBook. It doesn't support non-Apple hardware well. The software quality is not that great, there are various bugs and issues. I'll sometimes do a bit lightweight gaming, and to my surprise wine works better on Linux than native games on the Mac OS X I've played. There are "known issues" that many MacBook owners have with various games but these are seemingly ignored.

With Arch there were issues, but almost always they could be manually fixed with a bit of command line magic. With Apple the usual solution is to either pay around 20 to 30 dollars to buy some random software which should fix the issue or just deal with the problem. Just as an example, even basic stuff like an external mouse with scroll wheel doesn't work well due to inadjustable scrolling acceleration.

[nazgob]

Are you comparing 13" MacBook Retina Pro to Arch Linux? We can discuss OSX vs Arch Linux or MBP vs whatever hardware you used. Have you tried Arch on MBP?

[nawitus]

I'm comparing the whole experience, so hardware + software. The hardware of the MacBook may be a bit ahead of my old laptop, but that doesn't have a major effect on my user experience.