Apple is the only hardware company where you can buy a product and it is good hardware wise. Sure other companies have flagship offerings but with apple you get a really good base model.
And that is where it breaks down for me. Pay 20% more for freedom? Yes, absolutely. But pay more for much worse? Yeah, not many people are going to be so idealistic.
I don't know why no one else can produce a laptop with decent battery life with an near silent fan and good display and overall great production quality. Yes, it is much easier when you are as big as apple and can rely on economics of scale but that doesn't totally explain the lack of quality when it comes to the competition.
Them not having to support 30+ year old software means that they can be more nimble and make better hardware choices.
Look at the mess that Microsoft has made for itself by setting the requirement that software made in the 90s must still run on modern OSs and hardware. It's bonkers and is slowly killing the company.
Forcing people to create a MS account to log in their Windows computer, that's because of backward compatibility?
Pushing Copilot absolutely everywhere, that's because of backward compatibility?
GitHub being down almost daily, that's because of backward compatibility?
It will be very surprising if we see any benefits from cutting Rosetta 2, especially worth gutting all the games and software this has empowered via Steam/WINE/CrossOver.
Windows still owns the corporate drone desktop, but, oddly enough, that’s now being served as a VDI through a Linux thin client.
And that's also entirely orthogonal to hardware - the hardware battle between ARM Mac and ARM PC is really a battle between Apple and Qualcomm (Apple won).
In hindsight, rather than relying on Snapdragon, Microsoft should have started designing their own high-efficiency ARM SoCs 15 years ago like Apple did. But I mean, everything is clear in hindsight isn't it.
The screen blows apple out completely. It's clearly, obviously better. The fan noise and battery life are worse than Apple. The keyboard feels better to type on, the trackpad is slightly worse, but not enough to annoy me.
The new Pop OS cosmic is a very fun OS concept for laptops with the autotiling workspaces as a fundamental primitive.
From my research on Macbook alternatives only the Zenbooks looked like almost-an-even-match to me. Curious what's your experience with day-to-day fan noise and heat.
Screen brightness is not something I will compromise on after having a taste of greatness.
I personally wouldn't mind spending 30-40% more for a Linux laptop with similar qualities + repairability. But I will not settle for something much more expensive and worst in some aspects.
There are also arguments agains repairability in Framework's laptop. I did the calculations and for the Framework 16, it would be cheaper to buy a gaming Asus laptop and throw it out in a couple years to replace it versus buying a framework and upgrading it. Utter insanity.
Looks like the Framework laptops depend on model/screen, between 4-500 but with the new 13 pro hitting 700 nits. For a user replaceable screen, and backwards compatibility (I think), that's pretty solid.
That's the main issue for me. I am on M1 Max 32GB RAM. Except for local LLMs, there is absolutely nothing that gets even close to the performance limits of this device. As a result, all the work I do is performed in perfect silence. Very occasionally the device would get warm, never hot. Based on my usage, I could probably go for an Air model, except for how many external screens it supports.
Zero-noise is non-negotiable for me. It's lamentable how absolutely no-one comes even close.
Isn't that the whole reason why Apple is the company it is? Steve Jobs wanted to control the software AND the hardware. That hasn't changed, they're still the only one really. That does get you some benefits
Why does it matter to _you_ in particular that the base model is good ?
For a decade buying macs I never got the base model, I switched to the Asus ROG series and a Surface Pro, and again I'mm not on the base model of either.
I get that MacBooks are very good volume purchases and excellent value for those right in the target, but IMHO that's not the people writing in this thread.
I'm also not a fan of the "winner takes it all" view, customers should care about their very specific needs and do their research, it shouldn't matter that some product matches 80% of other people's needs if it doesn't fit them.
As a remote work terminal / casual computing system, the compromises are IMHO almost entirely psychological.
> remote work terminal / casual computing
I'm having a hard time grasping the difference
The only complain is bad battery life. With several VMs running mostly idle it doesn’t lasts even two hours. But then I used beefy MacBook M2 at my previous work and with VMs it lasted only 4 hours.
Apple's phones and laptop are 100 % the best in the market, but Apple is a terrible evil company - the walled garden stuff, the "you don't really own your device" stuff, the normalization of enshittification (removing headphone jack, nonreplaceable glued batteries, not giving charger with $1000 laptop, ...) that other manufacturers followed, the gold statue Cook gave Trump as a bribe.
But not just Apple. Teslas are the best electric cars on the market - but Musk got Trump elected, literally killed millions of people with his DOGE and did Sieg Heil on stage (twice, so we don't miss it). Or Garmin - objectively the best sport and adventure watches on the market, but evil anti-consumer planned obsolescence policies. You could go on.
I guess the choice is, am I willing to "suffer" (as much as using inferior product is suffering anyway) to not support these people? Or is my comfort mire important than doing the right thing?
And I'm not just being preachy - I have aging M1 macbook, aging Garmin watch and an aging ICE car and I spend few last months pondering. It's easy to prioritize comfort. Or I'm just being a whiny bitch.
(Funnily enough, for phones the dilemma really isn't there - you have just choice of Apple or Google having all your data and no matter how bad Apple is, Google is orders of magnitude worse.)
Apple hardware is only perfect when looked at through rose tinted glasses. The whole butterfly keyboard issue should be enough to indight them from being seen as perfect with hardware. There's a reason Applecare exists, and it's not just because of accidental spills.
It’s been 6 years. If anything hasn’t been updated by now, it’s either been abandoned or the developer needs a hard deadline. There are various programs out there where I question if it’s been abandoned. Periodic exercises like this help make it clear.
Far too many companies aren't willing to embrace newer paradigms/toolchains/software on the principle - if it works don't touch it or inventing some wild workarounds. I think in the end it's for good
The first is needing to know whether the app was 32 bit or not is sort of the main annoyance with that itself.
The second is not every app follows this rule correctly, for whatever reason.
The third is there isn't a clear path for mixed apps, e.g. Steam. On Windows, Steam is still a mix of 32 bit and 64 bit components, so there isn't really a "clean place for it to go. You could have one option of putting Steam in one or the other and then mixing 32/64 bit apps in that folder & you have the other option of duplicating things, moving the initial problem an extra directory level deeper. 3b is that Steam installs the games under its folder, and the games you can install can be 32 bit, 64 bit, or a mix - duplicating the problem yet again. Until the start of this year, Steam still supported 32 bit Windows and, therefore, you could also have 16 bit games be installed.
There were reasons to do the split in the early 2000s but holding on to each decision like this for decades after seems to cause more pain than it ends up avoiding.
Apple throwing their weight around in a pro-consumer way (Rosetta, ask app not to track) is why I use their devices
I don't understand how you can say that Apple is more pro-consumer than Microsoft here, considering that Microsoft guarantees that no matter whether the vendor is unwilling, out of business, dead, or otherwise unavailable, you can still run your software. Apple says you need to go find someone to put tens to hundreds of man-hours into updating software from god-knows-when, and if you can't do that, you can just go fuck yourself.
You say yourself, Microsoft is willing to put in the work to ensure that their customers will be able to run their binaries forever. Apple spits in your face and you thank them for it.
This would result in people losing access to a bunch of software just so Apple could shrug and shift the blame elsewhere. Because in the mind of an Apple fan, nothing is ever Apple’s fault.
2. Consumers losing the choice to use apps they bought or downloaded is not pro-consumer (if they want to continue getting OS security patches etc). As you said, it's a conscious choice by Apple to cause customers to lose access to software they'd bought etc, as Microsoft’s approach allows us to still use software from multiple decades ago.
(I’d gotten a piece of paid software from the iOS + iPad app store in 2011. I lost access a few years later during another Apple change.)
3. However, I think you're right that we will see more and more companies cause customers to lose access to existing software, features, etc that customers had bought, but similarly frame it as a good thing, forcing ‘modernization’, etc.
I’m not arguing that software needs to be updated every 2 weeks, as is the trend now. However, 6 years, when there have been major architectural changes and UI changes. At some point the software should be deemed abandoned and it’s time to find something new.
Even a simple update to support the M-series chips means the dev is still around and can release updates, even if there have been no other feature updates in 6 years as its finished software. The occasional sign of life on finished projects is helpful.
This is the 3rd time this has happened in roughly 2 decades by the way.
ppc/ppc64 -> x86_64 x86_64 -> x64 only x64 -> arm64
I much prefer Apple just forcing the developers to update their apps. Perhaps it’s just me though.
When people who care about it can carry on the torch.
Dropping support wouldn't matter if anyone outside of Apple could keep it alive instead, or if Rosetta 2 users could stay on the last supported OS and keep their devices secured through community patches etc.
I think it's hilarious that Apple managed to get criticised for being both too early AND too late with USB-C.
Yes.
* https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup...
and more recently, 486:
* https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linux-devs-start...
and here we are expecting support for completely different CPU classes. :)
As a customer I expect my software to work, permanently. Don't expect me to cry for the richest companies in the world.
Business decision, pure and simple. Value added and risk of people not moving forward was not worth the cost to them. They were also way smaller at the time than today, though the iPod had taken off.
I’m fine with them eventually dropping support for things. Some things I think they do too early.
Microsoft HAS to keep supporting stuff forever. That’s their bread and butter. Line of business apps. If they drop support businesses lose THE reason to stay with them.
It’s far less of an issue for Apple. And people do leave because of it. But not enough. It’s also one of the reasons (of many) they’re not very popular in business.
Not for long. The Classic environment depended on the system having a PowerPC CPU - it would not have run on Intel systems. (Rosetta translation would not have been applicable.)
I used it through all of that and really at no point was it feeling forced and the only one with real friction was classic mode the rest felt seamless.
They must have just been doing something right with dev relations and community.
Although I will say now a lot of people don’t seem to care with keeping up with far less extreme random iOS hurdles.
Define "consumer devices"? I am holding on to my AMD Ryzen machines until they literally fall dead. I have no complaints from them. Maybe some modern or even next-gen ARM CPUs will be even better on Linux but I don't think we are quite there yet.
x86_64 is here to stay for a long time still.
But maybe you literally meant x86 as in the 32-bit CPU arch? If so, I'd mostly agree but not quite; they could be used in low-power micro-PCs for a long time still as well.
Of course Apple can make a relatively cheap mass produced device that can outcompete on price / spec -- they've been making iPads for almost two decades now. They just threw a keyboard on one and changed the bootloader to boot OSX. Good for them. 20 years of R&D paid off for one of the largest and most valued and profitable companies in the world.
If I want a relatively cheap machine I can actually run Linux (or for other people, Windows) on, or can upgrade or repair... Apple is not in the running.
Its not just older architecture we are losing out on.
I don’t like it either but it has nothing to do with Apple.