Edit: I'm not trying to troll, I genuinely want to know why people put up with this. I bounce between Linux and Windows and have no loyalty to either of them. I've settled on Windows with WSL2 on my desktop but I'm tempted again to install the new Fedora on my Thinkpad. Is it the lock in? With my hardware I can run anything I want except for macOS. Once you buy Apple hardware it seems incredibly difficult to go elsewhere.
1) The hardware quality of other OEMs is bad too. Lenovo has really gone downhill. I sold my maxed-out X1 Carbon 7th Gen, which in less than a year: a) came with an LTE card that never worked for more than an hour at a time; b) had the display bezel start peeling off (it's a sticker!); c) developed a bunch of dead pixels; d) started randomly locking up; e) had weird issues with power usage, where some service related to the touchpad would go crazy and start using all the CPU.
2) Other laptop makers make design choices and trade-offs that I find unacceptable. For me, the 16" MBP is the perfect balance of power, weight, and battery life. It compromises by using a 3K screen instead of a 4K screen, and gets 11+ hours of light usage. Alternatives like the XPS 15 or Lenovo X1 Extreme force you to choose between an FHD panel and good battery life, or a 4K panel and substantially shorter battery life. The Surface Laptop 15" uses a 15W ultra-mobile processor in a machine that runs $2,800 when configured with 32GB of RAM, and has a battery half the size of the one in the MBP 16". Many 15" laptop vendors include a numeric keypad, which is a deal-breaker for me because it forces you to type at an angle to keep your hands centered in front of you when in the home position.
3) Touchpad and high-DPI scaling.
I won't switch back to Windows, but if I ever need to, I'd definitely consider using a MBP for it.
I have a similar issues with OEM's laptop quality years ago with both HP and Dell. System76 laptops have been a pleasure to use.
The new Lemur Pro has a 10th gen CPU, does not have a numpad, and does have an FHD panel. They claim up to 14 hours of battery life on Linux. (21 hours coding on VIM.)
https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
https://www.fosslinux.com/36826/system76-lemur-pro-a-linux-l...
(Or Linux, but I know Linux was in a bad state on new Macbooks as of fairly recently, don’t know if it has gotten better.)
A weird think to notice is that running a MacBook Air under bootcamp will make the display 300 nits brighter. https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-Apple-MacBook-Air-2020-is-...
> As Coil Whining is a big problem on this model we will try to find out witch parts are causing this noises. First we need to disassemble this notebook and identify the noisy parts.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/8ptfu8/would_you_acce...
> I immediately noticed I felt slightly 'uncomfortable' when it was on, and within about 30 seconds realised that it was emitting coil whine at a volume/pitch high enough to physically bother me. It's like an ever-present noise that I can only imagine must be how low levels of tinnitus feels to people who have to deal with that type of thing. I am pretty disappointed to say the least.
I might just assume that this is random internet griping, but I had this exact same problem on my last Dell laptop (admittedly, it was almost 20 years ago) and it drove me insane when working late at night. It's one of those little "quality of life" things I'm willing to pay extra for. (Not to say that Apple doesn't have quality-of-life issues, like randomly removing ports. But for the most part I find I can solve those issues just by throwing money at the problem. I can't do that with coil whine, or a non-centered keyboard, or a laptop that only offers either an FHD or a 4K display and no power-efficient compromise.
Touchpad hardware is good, but the software and adjustability... it's nowhere comparable to a Macbook.
There was only a single combination of hardware/OS X release that I ever recall experiencing kernel panics often enough to bother me. It was one of the first generations of Intel iMacs on release 10.4 or 10.5.
I'm currently using 10.5 (Catalina) on a work-provided 2018 13" MBP hooked to an external display via a Thunderbolt 2 dock. I use it for compiling Android and iOS mobile apps, web browsing, accessing work via VPN, Slack, Google Meet, all the normal things you'd expect of a developer machine.
I also have a personal 2017 non-retina MBA running Catalina. My wife has the same laptop running Mojave. Both kids have 11" MBA's running Mojave. There's a 2013 iMac in the house running Mojave.
I can't recall having seen a kernel panic on a single one of these machines ever. I'm not denying they happen to other folks, but if this is so common an issue, I'm surprised I haven't seen it across any of my machines.
Are there other issues with macOS and iOS that occasionally drive me crazy? Sure, let me tell you about iCloud drive syncing issues I've had to deal with. Or the bug in Bootcamp I just experienced yesterday where it doesn't properly account for the SSD portion of a Fusion drive when partitioning the drive for Mac/Windows. Or how screen rotation sometimes just gets stuck on iOS in the wrong orientation or at the wrong aspect ratio.
But having just installed Windows 10 yesterday... OMG, I'll take macOS over Windows any day of the week.
And no, Linux is still not an alternative. (I'm a recovering Sys Admin and used Linux as my desktop for about 5 years.) I want a single OS I can run on all of my devices, and Linux just isn't an acceptable consumer OS for myself and certainly not for my wife and kids. I want an OS that just connects to WiFi, just works with my printer, can sync photos and music with my phone, allows me to rent movies, sleeps and wakes properly, that I don't have to futz with, etc. I want an excellent tablet experience for my artist daughter. As much as possible, I don't want to have to be tech support for my family.
So that's why this guy puts up with Apple, warts and all. It's the best set of tradeoffs for me and my family.
TouchID does the security for me rather than having to repeatedly type in my password unless I restart the machine. Interestingly, it can be done on Apple Watch if you're savvy enough but I won't expect typical consumers to care about that but only TouchID. They would probably ask if this exists on Windows or another Linux distro, which the answer is 'there are equivalents'. For the former, it depends on the computer, but for the latter the kernel may support it, but requires some digging into getting it to work on your chosen distro, which isn't acceptable for a "consumer OS".
Even with Apple's incompetencies with NVIDIA, Metal requirements, no 32-bit support and their silly notarisation services snooping my executables, in the end I still use it. Why? Because macOS still 'just works' and gets out of the way. Some Linux distros are getting there but I have no time to play around with my dotfiles, desktop environment or fix my window manager to get work done. Which is why I'm now dual-booting with Windows for WSL2 instead of installing a Linux distro and worrying about breaking it by installing a conflicting library or system component.
Not sure what the 16"'s excuse is, tho; that's still a Skylake++++ (possibly more pluses, but basically still Skylake).
Basically: Catalina sucks, but there's nowhere to go that's unequivocally better.
https://www.techspot.com/guides/230-prevent-automatic-window...
You can also disable Cortana, the telemetry stuff etc. https://blogs.systweak.com/how-to-disable-telemetry-and-data...
https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script
You can disable the rebooting if you look in Default.preset file.
Even if it were a hardware problem that Catalina somehow tickled more often, if it only affected 5% of users it's still a problem. Being one of the lucky 95% doesn't diminish the experience of the 5%, especially if with Mojave the affected user base could have been 1%. We're not talking about $200 Chromebooks. These are $3K+ professional tools.
Bottom line: Catalina is less stable than Mojave.
The privacy. The comfort of having two devices (phone and computer) to be in sync in a private and safe manner. Excellent app ecosystem. Timely and long term updates, upgrades, and support.
But as the parent commenter says I am at my wit's end as well, for the first time since I started using Macs a decade ago - crappy recent OSX and iOS releases, iPhones getting bigger and bigger, being trapped in a data/communication silo etc.
So why am I still here? Because there's nowhere else that's better.
Linux users said the same thing in 1996. It didn’t work then, either.
Anyone working on desktop Linux should know they’ve hit saturation with their current approach. What‘s missing or broken that’s causing Mac users to prefer a system that crashes once a day?
- driver support (even my thinkpad has an unsupported fingerprint driver, and a buggy intel wifi driver)
- fragmentation that affects user experience. For example, there is still the gnome / kde divide, and using a combination of apps from both is visually jarring.
- lack of microsoft and adobe apps, lack of high quality productivity apps (e.g. i would love a pixelmator equivalent)
- many paper cuts, like how copy and paste of images only works half of the time
- when things break, you have to drop down to the terminal to fix them, instead of running some automated repair wizard
So, no snark intended, but where you have you been for the last 5 years? Windows and Microsoft are undergoing a renaissance and moving ahead and improving. macOS is regressing.
- Runs Adobe CC
- Does not throw ads at me
I‘m happy to take suggestions for an alternative to macOS.
Also, the seamless integration (call it lock-in) across devices is a nice bonus.
I bought XPS 13 laptop about a year ago, in the hopes of finally jumping to the other side.
I have tried to use both, Linux and Windows, and UX just isn't there. Linux is still the most buggy desktop OS (I know, it's not an OS, but a kernel, but in this context I mean every possible combination of drivers, programs, and desktop environments).
If we start with the XPS 13, which is/was regularly recommended as the Linux laptop, the most annoying things are coil whine and fan loudness. I cannot even watch a movie at night, without either of them bothering me. My MBP is fairly quiet, especially when not doing much (doing hardware accelerated decoding of H.264 is something that should produce any noise). Not just the laptop, even the charger has the coil whine (thankfully I can just reuse MBP charger here).
Moving on, let's talk about Linux. There is still no sane way of having multiple screens with different scaling factor (I can't see anything useful on 4k 13" display without the scaling, and external 4k monitor shouldn't need it.) I have tried Wayland, which sort of fixes the issue, but there are other problems there. Last time I checked, GNOME Wayland cannot handle playback of a video, and scrolling in the browser on the same screen. When you scroll the content in the browser, video frames drop, and make video unwatchable. I forgot what the underlying issue was, but it was open for quite a while. Most of the things are broken on KDE wayland, and for the rest you usually need hacks.
Then we have things like bad performance (especially regarding the graphics) of web browsers, which work fine on Windows, on the same machine.
Touchpad issues are well known; I couldn't make it to mimic Windows behaviour (which should be possible since it's the same hardware), so let's just not get started on macOS experience here.
Regarding the Windows, general UX is much much better than Linux, and apart from touchpad, it seems on par with macOS, if we ignore all the telemtry, preinstalled CandyCrush and other unneeded software. Some things are bettern than on macOS, and vice versa.
Regarding the development UX, we do have WSL2, Windows Terminal, and stuff like this, which is great. It's a major improvement from the state we had a year or more ago.
However, WSL2 is far from perfect. I have seen issues such as WSL2 not starting for a single user, but it worked for the rest, which required reboot to solve. Sometimes, Visual Studio Code couldn't connect to the WSL2, and again, occasionally machine would have to be rebooted.
There is no USB support for WSL2, so I had to resort to exposing of USB devices via network on Windows, and using a client to attach those devices in WSL2 VM. There is no support for bridged network, so we cannot easily discover LAN devices, for example when we want to flash ESP8266 devices. Did I mention there is no native USB support, so you cannot flash it this way either?
Running Windows programs from WSL or viceversa has its own problems, and since there is no virtualization support in WSL2 (understandable of course), using Minikube was far from ideal.
macOS is far from perfect, and even if majority of the apps/libraries need fixes, since macOS is not completely compatible with Linux APIs, majority of the libraries have the support for it. I can easily run majority of the software natively, without any VMs. With Windows, some things work natively, but for the rest you have to resort to an VM or WSL(2).
Using libusb is the same as on Linux, and projects using it can be compiled for macOS with minimal changes.
"It's like a B&D (bondage and dominance) relationship. There needs to a psychosexual analysis of the Mac community."