Also, the UI has been in decline for a decade or so, with the regrettable decisions under Alan Dye. Thankfully, Zuck poached him and we're all grateful for that. I mean, what they've done to our icons is tragic, the glyphs in the menus was intern-level boneheaded, and reduction of contrast to "get out of the way" of our content has made everything less usable, especially for people with vision issues.
A bug that I filed about window-ordering when using the Cmd-` / Shift-Cmd-` shortcuts has been live since 2010 without getting fixed, though an industrious HN user posted a link to the background utility they made to fix it themselves[0].
Apple Music must have been written by an intern or outsourced, how can you have a music playing app crash and do a System Report just by hitting the previous song button.
They are avoiding GPL3 licensed software and some GPL2 software are getting outdated.
That's why they didn't upgrade bash3 to bash4 , and replaced rsync with openrsync
Jeff Goldblum's 30 second "Presenting three easy steps to the internet" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjY0xsoozs8
And now when you want to set up a fresh Mac it's a parade of dialogue boxes:
Do you want to turn on Siri? No. (the dialogue-choice is probably "maybe later" ugh)
Do you want to share app analytics with developers? Yes.
Do you want to add Touch ID? No, because I'm setting this up for someone else.
There are more!
I gave those examples -- each of which having a different answer or reason -- to show that the problem of onboarding is nontrivial, but Apple has spent no(?) effort toward fixing it. It's the same for new iPhones and iPads.
NB I don't know if you sign into your Apple account it pre-answers these questions. That'd be nice.
But the Goldblum phrase I really try to keep alive is thinking jail, as in "What is beige? It's not even a color. Were they in thinking jail?" I often remark out loud when I realize I have been in thinking jail on a subject.
When you install Chrome, which you cannot accidentally do, and when you set it as the OS browser default, which you also cannot accidentally do...
... the next time you launch Safari, it will say that the default browser has been changed, "Did you mean to do that?" and of the two options presented ("Keep using Chrome" or "Switch back to Safari") the Safari option will be the default.
That's my experience on M4 Mac Mini and M3 MacBook Air.
Is it amazing for LLM stuff? No, but that's the same story for anyone else _not_ spending boatloads, or willing to hack on weird mining cards.
Given how much more you can get buying used versus new, I'd go used unless there's some feature/characteristic only the new hardware has.
Having said that, I could see stuff slowing down over time with OS updates/etc. I've had my M1 air for a while, and some UI stuff was slower after specific updates (I think glass in particular).
I've been running it for 3 years now. I am so macpilled that I had to install it on my new Framework 13 pro.
The Mac muscle memory was always my biggest hurdle with Linux. I always felt handicapped by it. But Toshy eliminates that.
As a recent Mac-> Windows switcher for work, my productivity has nosedived partially for keybinding confusion. For instance, I instinctively reach for Option+Arrow keys to jump the cursor over words, which mapped onto the Windows keyboard is Windows->Arrow, which moves the whole window around the desktop into predefined positions. Cool feature, but my muscle memory for the other thing means I'm always screwing up window position (and never thinking to use it on purpose).
I've lost count of how many interfaces I've had to fenangle to get a job done. For 20 odd years I rocked Gentoo as my daily driver but my lap can't take the heat any more. Wifey gets Arch and I've settled on Ubuntu for a simple life.
Embarrassingly enough, I had to get a "child" to explain to me how to get a wine dispenser to work, recently 8)
Here's to hoping they don't turn into Microsoft one day.