this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2024
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Ha! I totally agree! But I also can't resist defending Mac a little bit.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I grew up on Commodore, then DOS + Windows, then Windows (when it became all-in-one and not just a GUI shell over DOS). I got into Linux desktops and servers in college and will only ever do a server on Linux, of course. Throughout all of this, both software consumption and development have been constants for me.
Right now, I greatly prefer MacBooks for productivity, and I have been keeping a Windows PC going for flight simming, though I'm tempted to switch that to Linux ever since MS declared it too old to run Windows even though it's still perfectly capable of doing everything I care about--MS just insists on "trusted platform" hardware now.
Anyways, the point I'm going for is that Mac is also for nerds, especially ones who understand Windows and Linux and just enjoy a nice workstation that combines the best of both worlds. Windows is trying to catch up with WSL, but it's still a bolt-on, whereas Mac is BSD under the hood. I've been hearing about nice Linux laptop options and hope it will get to an equally nice experience, but, for now, Mac, for me, is like a new car. Sure, I used to do my own maintenance and some repairs on my old cars, but now I have a job and can pay for something that usually just works, that allows me plenty of ways to tinker, and that I can pay to have fixed when I don't want to spend my time grinding on something unfulfilling.
IMHO,
Windows has completelly stopped its trend of becoming less shit over time and has actually started going backwards.
Modern Macs (having used both, I would say they aren't really direct descendants of the original Macs but rather they're major redesigns) already started at a point when usuability could be done better, kept improving for longer and, even though they stopped improving in terms of usability, unlike Windows they haven't gone back.
Linux is the only one that still keeps on improving (though usuability-wise it started ever further back than Windows), though slower than the others and often in a two-steps-forward-and-one-back fashion, so it's about to go past Windows (one might stay that it has already done so in usability and is only the large number of Windows-only applications that keeps Windows ahead) and hopefully will eventually pass Macs too.
Whilst what I expect for Linux has a big dollop of hopefulness, for the rest I think it's pretty obvious that Windows has never surpassed Macs in terms of usability and will never do.
Don't you find them extremely restrictive and hard to repair? I know they want the walled garden, and absolutely don't want anyone opening up a Mac/iphone and changing hardware other than a Apple tech. That removes all the fun from tinkering with and customizing your stuff.
Fair point! I don't know what I'll do whenever I eventually have to replace mine. I was lucky (I guess) to get the last model that had a removable drive and the keyboard I ended up loving. I upgraded my storage to 2 gigs and felt that covered everything I cared to change on this one.
But I'll have to seriously reconsider on future models, as I am enticed by the newer Apple chips but have certainly heard the uproar about the relatively small amount of ram offered. And now that we're on the subject, I'm not thrilled about the idea of Apple dropping OS support (i.e., security updates) for older models. I want to upgrade when I'm ready for an overhaul in performance, not just because they want to sell more.
I guess I need to be more specific about "nerd." I find it great for software nerdiness, but I have to admit the only physical use case nowadays is plebian: "just take my money and make it work."