this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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I don't agree with the Mac one.
The Mac UI is basically windows 3.1.
It's absolutely awful.
Also, windows will never brick your machine because of a full hard drive. My wife has a shitty MacBook air. She filled the drive completely. The OS can no longer function. It boots and that's it. You can't open anything, you can't delete anything. Every single click says free up HDD space, even deleting files.
It's so fucking bad.
The almost exact same thing happened to a friend of mine using Windows 11. The machine booted, but he was unable to log in.
Also windows 10 updates has twice deleted all my files, I am now no longer on windows.
edit: Thanks to psud@aussie.zone for teaching me something new. (quotes formatting is a thing)
You can format quotes better by starting each quoted line with a >
It looks like
Thanks
Please tell me you had backups
I did for the most important stuff, but redownloading my game library was not fun.
Your wife’s experience sucks, but having done IT for sizable orgs in the past, my experience was that OS X and Apple’s hardware usually needed less coddling than the various Windows machines. Although they did have some lemon OS releases here and there, and those fucking keyboards from several years back were the devil.
Any OS is going to have anecdotal horror stories. If you want to get a real read on reliability you really need more than a sample size of 1. You need scale.
Can't scale. Hard drive full.
I was supporting MacOS and Windows systems in an extremely vertical stability situation and I honestly never had to touch the Windows machines that were cobbled together parts computers. All the Mac's were a constant house of cards waiting to topple. Coming drives constantly for last minute hail Mary solutions, crashing issues that could never be explained without any explanation or hint to what the issues were. Sending systems back and forth for repair. Fuck it, avoid MacOS at all costs
I’ll take my experience out of the picture. If you google Mac and PC enterprise costs, or total cost of ownership, you can find a ton of enterprise studies on this.
Usually the big problem with MacOS is whether it supports the damn software the organization / department needs. And by support, I mean native, not through a janky emulator.
TCO, has been compelling for decades. Folks often report longer lasting workstations, fewer tickets, and less malware. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All I see is sources that say Windows is less problematic and less expensive long and short term. I found one source that says otherwise called JAMF and that actually turned out to be, well, as they put it "Helping organizations manage and secure an Apple experience that end users love and organizations trust." So I'm gonna have to omit this guy for bias
What does it even mean "more dependable"? And the "ease of use" apparently comes at the cost of user control and privacy, the old "walled garden."
Yeah, the "ease of use" one is complete bullshit. It's "easy to use" if you're accustomed to their "walled garden" model and don't mind everything being automated so as to deepen your dependency on their larger ecosystem.
It's all bullshit.
Well to begin with, it only has one control panel instead of like 3
That's insane lol, how did they even let an issue lile that slip by... is it just a bug with one version of MacOS or something?
Also to fix it, maybe you could reinstall MacOS? I installed MacOS on a computer I built for a friend years ago, it was a "hackintosh." If you can install it on all non approved hardware surely it's possible with an actual Macbook. Just because they're so absurdly expensive it would be a shame for it to be gone for good. Which is another issue with Apple's x86 products, you're paying what like $1500 or more for about $350 of hardware which half the time thermal throttles anyway because they make it thin at the expense of cooling.
Yeah, the issue is, the laptop is full of photos. She took it to Apple after I failed to figure it out. They said they can wipe it but not recover the photos.
It's just a crap system.
Ahh I see, yeah that's a tricky situation. Maybe one of these solutions could work? the first paragraph or so says that if you can turn the Mac on, even if you cant do anything, recovering the data might not be as hard
$350 in hardware sure, hardware that someone had to design and especially nowadays with Apple Silicon, that shit doesn't come cheap
Yeah I guess Apple have there own x86 chips now? Regardless I would rather have a normal computer with an AMD or Intel chip and pay a normal price. I'm sure those CPUs would be better for my purposes anyway
They use ARM now, which is super efficient, the laptops last forever on battery.
If there's one thing Apple's done right, it's Apple Silicon
Huh I haven't really kept up with consumer tech for the last few years, that's interesting. Didn't they have software issues with instruction sets being different? Or does MacOS being Unix based help with that or something. I do know their mobile processors have been competitive especially in single core performance for a while so I'm sure their desktop ones are good.
But, either way they products were still 3x the price of comparable products even when they had crappy x86 Intel CPUs lol. I'm still not very convinced they're not overpriced sorry to say
They've built a translation layer in for compatibility, though it's not perfectly fast, it's more than good enough from what I've heard.
It being Unix based definitely helps, though don't doubt Apple wouldn't have been able to deal with it if that weren't the case.
The chips really shine in laptops, I'd say desktops are a bit weaker, unless you're doing something heavily optimized (Final Cut Pro f.e.).
The biggest win is energy consumption, the difference is insane, I recommend you look up a benchmark or two, can range from 2 to 10x more efficient.
I honestly don't agree though that they're 3x the price of comparable products, the new Macbook Airs are pretty solid pieces of hardware for an okay sum of money. It really depends on your workload though, if you're gaming, you're gonna have a terrible time, if you're a dev / work in the browser / do some light editing you're gonna love the battery life and perf's not gonna hold you back.
Yeah that's definitely quite interesting, it's pretty similar to what Microsoft was trying to do with putting Windows on phones I the Early 2010s. I think only really Sony ever adopted it for their phones and they never sold well, but I thought it was interesting at the time.
There's a decent amount of ARM laptops that are running Windows so maybe that it where the laptop market is heading, it makes sense because the big.LITTLE cores ARM SOCs use are specifically designed to use as little power of course. A Chromebook I had a while ago had a (iirc) Tegra K1 ARM and that had great battery life even for a Chromebook.
As far as pricing on Apple products goes I don't think you will ever convince me they're good value for money :P. Sure 3x the price of comparable products is am exaggeration, I would say it's more like 1.5 or 1.75x the price normally. I mean saying it's "good for web browsing" essentially just means it doesn't have good components but these things are priced in the range of what like $1000 right, you could get a nice chromebook that also has an ARM CPU and is good for web browsing as half the price. I'm sure MacOS on ARM is a more useful OS than ChromeOS in terms of the software you can use on it, but for most users that probably isn't even important.
I think there's a reason Apple has the largest cash reserves and of any company and the highest market cap (not sure if that's the case ATM) but they move less products than companies like Samsung, it's because they have fat profit margins. I'm not saying their products are bad, they're mostly great and some of their products are genuinely disruptive. I just think they aren't good value you know. Which is fine, they aren't really meant to be I don't think.
Windows on ARM is really incomparable to MacOS on ARM, it's like comparing a 15yos Hello World to a senior engineer's 10yo project.
Yes, for simple web browsing ChromeOS is just fine, but you can do so much more with a fullblown system. The performance is also in another league.
I honestly would say that the 16GB mbAir is good value, if it fits your use case (no gaming / heavy x86-only programs).
Don't forget Apple makes a shitton of money from services (AppStore, iCloud...), which often make a lot more money than hardware (so Sammy is at a disadvantage here).
I'm not trying to convince you the Apple's awesome, I don't think that myself either (on the contrary), but their chips just are pretty awesome
Well I never said MacOS on ARM isn't a lot better than Windows on ARM, I've heard about the issues people have had with their ARM Surface Pros.
I think for the specific use case you mentioned, being someone who needs to do more than just web browsing and needs to go without access to an electrical outlet often, while not needing to use x86 software- in that case sure if you can afford it a MacBook is good value because not really anything else competes with it.
I just see a lot of people drop $1000+ on these things and then just watch YouTube on it and edit Google docs etc lol. That is more what I was thinking of when I say they're overpriced. Those people are just buying Macbooks, and other Apple products because Apple is a very powerful brand which is why they can have relatively fat profit margins because the strong brand image makes their products' demand more inelastic. Not saying I have anything against that though. It's not like I spend all of my money perfectly rationally, everyone has different things they like to splurge on I suppose.
Honestly, whyd they never think to use a seprate home partition or setup quotas or fix hdd expectations to prevent errors bricking the desktop.
It's also become less and less stable over the years