Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is “switching to iPhone”, a similar thing happens with “just use a Mac”. Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?
Most of the time, using an iPhone, Mac, etc., does not “just work”. Maybe the UI is simply not very usable (not just Liquid Glass, see MacOS’s terrible implementation of a settings app, iOS not having an option to combine the quick settings and notifications), third-party devices (headphones, chargers, tablets, etc.) simply do not work well (no, “get the iDevice” is not helpful!), iOS having the most ass file management that may as well not exist, all the different bugs poking around everywhere (through my own experiences with iOS* and my friend’s with MacOS), etc. “Give more money to Apple to fix it” is not good advice and does not help to solve anything.
Why is it that, when Apple has inherently worse hardware, everybody seems to put up with it? On their Macs, you have 60 Hz LCD displays on a $1000+ laptop, no good ports selection unless you spend thousands more, ridiculously priced memory and storage upgrades that would be a death sentence to any other company, very shallow key travel that feels terrible to type on compared to other options, etc. As for their iPads, you have similarly not so great displays on a relatively high end tablet unless you spend thousands on a tablet with an uber-fancy M5 chip (why would anyone need that???), a keyboard case that is so expensive despite feeling like a cheap membrane keyboard you got on Aliexpress and being so top-heavy, etc. Who in their right mind would purchase a $550 set of headphones made of ridiculously heavy metal, with uncomfortable cushions, terrible battery life, mid ANC, and several year old innards?
How has Apple manipulated so many people with their marketing? I don’t really see anything quite like it in other product segments. What is the secret apple sauce?
*note that I currently run an Android phone, but I have my issues with them too that I won’t get into. My particular device is very bloated and incredibly annoying to work with sometimes, but it’s what I’ve got. On my laptop I happily run Linux, where the device simply listens to me which is a nice change of pace
edit: Actually, no, I think something similar occurs with Nintendo (in video games) and Disney (for films)
Most of the time it does work, which is why it’s so goddamned hard to undo. I’ve been working on de-appleing, I’ve nearly completely de-Amazoned and am also working on de-googling. But these damn providers make it so difficult, they get in so deep. It’s not even me that makes it hard, I’m willing to make a little extra effort for a more privacy focused platform I control. No, it’s the family and friends that all are perfectly comfortable handing control of their data and frankly lives (everything is in these fucking things, schedule, contacts, financial stuff, all digital communication, photos, videos, etc…).
As long as you keep spending a lot of money, and upgrading to the newest devices, you will have a decent experience. As soon as you try to extend the life, find alternatives, look for ways to control your own data, then it gets real hard.
To be fair, it’s not just Apple. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, any of the big players are the same. They all manage to make it easy, so long as you are comfortable being captured.
They give free macs to public schools, so when those kids get to college or join the adult world, they can only use MacOS.
Same reason Google gives away Chromebooks and Microsoft furnishes computer labs and gave free computer classes to teachers and corporations. Plain market capture. If you convince people that your product is what computers are, then they will prefer it due to familiarity and aversion to change.
They work quite hard to make it all work together well, and push to make their devices status symbols. Apple is the premium product everyone wants, and all that.
So the hardware may be lacking, but Apple tries to make up for it in making the OS work nicely, and tie in relatively nicely with any other Apple devices you have.
By comparison, the other options aren’t nearly as seamless. I’d need a lot more fiddling to send my keyboard and mouse inputs to an android tablet, or share the clipboard, for example, compared to a Mac being able to just push the mouse and keyboard to an iPad with no extra work.
The file management remains atrocious over USB (it’s basically the iTunes file transfer interface), on both Mac and Windows, but they’ve basically tried to paper over it with airdrop and an iDevice file manager.
Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is “switching to iPhone”, a similar thing happens with “just use a Mac”. Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?
At least from my personal perspective, I’ve never heard nor seen people recommending someone buy a different device to supplement something they’re currently using.
With the exception of things like debugging (for some bewildering reason, if your Mac’s software breaks, you need another Mac to repair the software), it tends to be fairly self-contained.
The closest thing seems to be more that if you’re on a device that Apple hasn’t released the full set of features on, some stuff just doesn’t work properly, because it expects the full feature set, and seemingly ends up trying to annoy you into replacing it that way.
On my old iPad Mini 2, for example, you couldn’t actually close the slide-out panel, or expand an app there, since Apple didn’t let them use the split view, and you needed that to expand the window. The closest you could get is making the app crash when in the slide-out, and then it would open normally, or a lot of finagling by swapping it out with a different app, and then running the original app you wanted to.
My current one has a different issue where some apps have Apple Intelligence specific features that I cannot turn off, because the setting I need to change is put away under Apple Intelligence’s settings, and that’s not available on my device, so the settings are also inaccessible.
As someone who prefers linux but is relegated to Windows, my wife is strictly an Apple person and I have to say I’m impressed with them.
She doesn’t use a laptop a lot but she has some upcoming certifications to renew and so she brought out her 2015 macbook pro. It was outdated and had no recent OS updates available. However after a simple manual installation of a few year newer OS it runs just fine. At one point we considered buying her a new laptop this time. While looking at new laptops I told her we could get a cheaper Windows one that would be ok for a few years or another, slightly more expensive macbook that would last another 10. I don’t think we’ll need to buy a new one though as her 2015 seems ok to run at least until 2028 and that’s only because of available OS upgrades.
Our kids were also using her iPad 2 when they were younger from 2011 and it ran fine until 2022 and again, no hardware issues, just old performance and lack of support.
But probably the biggest thing is when I put a pihole on my network. Almost EVERY device be it google, Samsung, Windows, LG, smartphones, printers, TVs, etc etc is CONSTANTLY pinging outside your network. To the tune of thousands of blocked attempts per day per device. Yet Apple products are constantly at the bottom of the blocked attempts list, closer to about 100 per device per day.
I used to be an Apple hater, but switched ~4 years ago for some of the reasons you’ve given here.
I handed my 2012 fat macbook pro down to my mom. Still kicking with 16 gigs of RAM since I upgraded it when I still had it. I myself got it for like a hundred or two hundred euros. It’s running on a newer MacOS than it officially supports with opencore. Yes, Linux will support devices even longer, but how many laptops have this kind of hardware longevity? Mostly just Thinkpads, but not all generations of those either. And SOME generations of Elitebooks, but not most of them. Bit of a survivorship bias on this one though, some of the 2010-2012 15" models had different forms of graphics chip failure, mine was 13".
Android landscape is changing, but when I switched to iOS, you could get, for the same price, 3 years of Android updates for a flagship phone vs ~5-7 for iOS. But if you have an iPhone 8, you still got security updates in May despite not having had a new major version since 2022. That model is turning 9 this year.
Android runs on non-Google devices too, so Google needs to make money off those by doing something other than selling hardware. iOS only runs on Apple devices, they’ve already made their money off each device. Not saying they’re absolute privacy champions, but they have a lot more to lose in terms of reputation if they were doing extensive spying on you 24/7.
This all without even getting into the Apple Silicon chips. M1 when I had it was ridiculously fast and power efficient already.
I can answer this from the perspective of someone who, until 18 months ago, was all-in on Apple stuff.
The short answer is: As long as all of your devices are reasonably new and running the latest software, they’re all really good at talking to each other. Got a Mac and an iPad? Great, you can use Universal Control to operate the iPad using your Mac’s keyboard and mouse/trackpad. And that is a genuinely useful technology. Got something on your phone that you want to share with your partner on the TV? AirPlay it across to Apple TV. And so, and so forth.
Thing is, once you’re in that situation, you’re kinda stuck. If your Mac ages out of OS feature support, the only option is to replace the Mac if you want it to match the interconnectivity features of your new iPhone. So the answer in that situation is to buy a new Mac, one that supports the new features available in the newest OS. At that point, your options are to either shell out £1000+ on a new Mac, or completely change your workflow to one that can be achieved using open source or paid alternatives. The vast majority of people have neither the time nor the inclination to set up things like that, so they factor in the cost of a new computer, phone, or iPad every few years.
But Apple’s real secret sauce is that - and judging by the attitude you’re swinging around in your post, OP, you’re not going to like this - they make REALLY good hardware.
My primary computer is still a 15" M2 MacBook Air. That thing is super thin, super light, completely silent to use and has never given me a moment’s trouble in three years that I didn’t somehow inflict on myself. Using Crossover, I can play Windows games on it just as easily as using Steam/Proton on my Linux PC. I can play RDR2 on my fanless ARM laptop and get a perfectly fine 30fps when I’m not at home. The battery is three years old but still gives me a full day of use. Sure, it only has two ports, but both of them are Thunderbolt 4, and it has a dedicated Magsafe charging port.
I still have my 2011 MacBook Pro at home. It’s currently running Debian and is still rock solid. Looking a little rough around the edges these days, but still a perfectly usable computer - that’s 15 years old.
Apple has inherently worse hardware
This just isn’t true. At all. The build quality of their hardware is the best in the business.
Sure, they effectively paywall things like 120hz screens to the higher end Pro models, but they have enough market research telling them that people who buy a mid range iPhone don’t care about refresh rates, or even know what they are. Why spend money on a QoL upgrade that the user will never notice?
But yeah, their cost for memory and storage is downright criminal, and always has been. The only thing that’s changed in recent(ish) years is that now everything is soldered or proprietary, they’ve made it effectively impossible to upgrade it yourself at a far, far lower cost. And that’s incredibly shitty.
These days I’m primarily a Linux user. My work PC is Kubuntu, my home server Debian, my gaming PC CachyOS. None of those machines are as easy to use as my Macbook running macOS 15. They can (theoretically) achieve more, but in the 2 years I’ve been using Linux I’ve had to teach myself how to use a command line; something I very, very rarely needed to when I just used macOS alone.
But I reached a point where I got sick of Apple’s bullshit, their performative stance on progressive politics that didn’t match the image of Tim Apple licking Trump’s ring. So I traded in my iPhone 13 mini for a Pixel 9 onto which I immediately installed GrapheneOS. That one act completely broke the spell of the interconnected nature of Apple products for me. I still have an iPad mini, but 90% of its use is as a peripheral for my MacBook, where it does still have genuine utility.
So yeah, Apple don’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, they just make good hardware running software that’s mostly good and useful. People, it may shock you to learn, generally prefer to use devices that don’t need much tinkering to keep them running.
But Apple’s real secret sauce is that - and judging by the attitude you’re swinging around in your post, OP, you’re not going to like this - they make REALLY good hardware.
I’d argue that their hardware is middling, but they make up for the shortcomings with decent software. Sort of the opposite of Windows, where you might have some nice hardware that gets held back by bad software (especially with the disastrous windows updates lately). Hence there being a really nice period of time where you could squeeze Mac OSX onto better hardware and ideally get the best of both worlds.
Apple has historically not been the value pick in pure hardware specs alone, and I don’t doubt that you could absolutely shop around and get a computer that, on paper, would be more powerful. Before the RAM price hike, they were the subject of mockery because they charge exorbitant prices for increasing the amount of memory in a machine you wanted to be (it was in the region of +$300 for another 16GB to get it to 32GB).
I’m not an expert on non-Apple hardware by any means, but the Apple stuff I’ve had over the past 20 years has all be incredibly well built. The lone exception was the white plastic MacBook I got in 2007 which was broadly good, but designed in such a way that the palm rest would always chip where the little standoffs at the top of the screen pushed against it when it was closed. But other than that, iPods, iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple TV, all of them have been very, very well put together.
Whether the components inside were good value for what I paid is a different matter, but the build quality was always exceptional. I never had a MacBook released between 2016 and 2019 though. We don’t talk of those.
But yeah, the software - even with all the current shortcomings - has always been good. Moving from iOS to Graphene was one hell of a learning curve in working out that it was always easy to do stuff on my phone because Apple had put the work into making software that did what their customers needed it to. And for whatever reason, most folks who make apps for iOS/iPadOS put a lot of effort into making their apps really nice to use. The same isn’t always true of Android.
They no longer make really good hardware.
Their hardware has been better relative to the competition than ever in the ARM era. The M5 is a monster. I just wish I could afford one with plenty of RAM and could run Linux on it.
Yeah, my only wish for my M2 is that Asahi is up to 100% by the time Apple pull the support for it. It’s close. Damn close. But still far enough away that it feels like a compromise.
I use Arch. Since around 2009. I might stop soon. My 2018 desktop might be the last PC I own. I got a MacBook from work and I’ve been using it more and more the last few years. Macs are so ridiculously fast and power efficient, it’s not even funny. I see the new laptops on LTT and you either have to use windows 11 or struggle with x86 processors.
The Macs have awesome build quality screen, sound, haptics, speed, battery life, thermals…
I tolerate the OS, I’m either on the console, IDE or browser 95% of the time anyway. Rectangle for window tiling + homebrew makes me feel 97% “at home”. I wish Asahi would allow me to run KDE but I’ll take it.
I don’t even have any other grapple product, I imagine if you have airpods, iPhone, apple TV, etc it’s even better and more magical.
Have you ever heard the phrase ‘walled garden?’ Apple makes their products to work very well together and with anyone else’s products they work in a way that is intentionally functional, so they can’t be said to be actually blocking interoperability, but mediocre, so you’ll get a better experience with their products. If you care about price, you aren’t using apple anyway, so it milks their price-insensitive customer base for more money while only really bothering the people who wouldn’t buy them anyway.
I think there’s a neurotype of people who are more likely to have expendable income and have a certain view on how computers should work and also really seem to be concerned about appearance and social credit. Apple knows exactly who their customers are and cater exclusively to their customer base.
If you have any kind of bent towards getting more from less then you likely have existed in spaces devoid of resources. And are therefore not their target market
At this point I would rather use a Mac than windows I suppose. They are actually rather secure and are Unix which is nice.
But in general, if you don’t care about moral, being caught in an actively hostile eco system, have enough money, and being the little bitch of bog tech, Apple is quite nice?
I mean tbh what is a valid Alternative? Android, same big tech dependency, just different company. Samsung wannabe apple but in shit and more evil. Windows, same big tech, just incompetent company and evil on top.
So apple seems at least to be quite okish if you don’t have the skill to degoogle your phone and use Linux?
In my bubble, apple has very little bad press about security, had few bugs until maybe 2 years ago, then it got worse I think? And the device connectivity is pretty solid. If you have enough money, their devices are pretty high quality, from a manufacturing standpoint. And they slowly allow repairs on their devices again
Apple is a cult.
As far as laptops go, exactly which company is producing a competitive product to Macs? Like at this point it’s a no brainer, get a cheap Mac for an average user and they get better hardware and don’t have to deal with how bad Windows has become. I’ve even switched grandma over to one after her PC died.
I run Linux for my own stuff but given a choice between a mac or windows for work I’ll take the Mac every time. Even the cheapest Mac beats the typical business laptops. Good screen. Touchpad that doesn’t utterly suck. Better performance.
Sounds like you’re not a system admin. Sounds like you’re comparing the shittiest possible PCs to Macs.
I like the part where I bought a $350 PC laptop for Christmas and it does everything and saved me hundreds of dollars.
<Shittiest possible PCs. Yeah, that’s what corps distribute to their employees. They suck but we gotta use them because only their hardware is allowed on the network.
$350 pc laptops suck. I’ve never used one that price worth a damn.
I run hybrid zoom sessions for people and rely solely on macbooks to run them. I have never had issues with them, and am very happy to stay on their OS (tahoe now).
Why is it that, when Apple has inherently worse hardware
Uhm … no? They have some of the best hardware, it’s just expensive.
Yup. I’m no fan of Apple, but I like to be honest about my criticisms. And hardware quality is not one of them.
They have some of the best hardware, it’s just expensive.
And that’s the problem. Unless you spend unreasonable amounts of money, you don’t get a display that is similar in class to their competitors, the I/O, the keyboard, etc.
And in the case of their over-ear headphones, their hardware is poor while still being expensive!
I don’t see the issue with a 60 Hz display, you’re not getting one for gaming. They have thunderbolt 4 ports, which is all you need and their keyboards are just fine. Some people prefer shallow key travel.
Not sure about their peripherals as I don’t use them, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with their laptops other than being a bit more pricey.
I don’t see the issue with a 60 Hz display, you’re not getting one for gaming.
But the devices don’t exist in a bubble. Laptops that cost much less get 90 or 120 Hz displays, and similarly priced options get OLED and touch support!
They have thunderbolt 4 ports, which is all you need
Until you need to connect your laptop to an HDMI display and don’t happen to have the required dongle that is sold separately. Or when you have a USB(-A) flash drive, you need a dongle too.
Both of these cases are very common for all groups of people, particularly in educational settings.
Some people prefer shallow key travel.
Fair point actually
but there is absolutely nothing wrong with their laptops other than being a bit more pricey.
Again, that’s the issue.
But the devices don’t exist in a bubble. Laptops that cost much less get 90 or 120 Hz displays, and similarly priced options get OLED and touch support!
Ok, so some cheaper laptops have a useless advantage over macbooks. I don’t care. If I could pay one extra doller to get a macbook with a 120 Hz display, I’d save the dollar.
Until you need to connect your laptop to an HDMI display and don’t happen to have the required dongle that is sold separately.
That’s a feature! Dongles are great. You can connect dozens of peripheral by plugging in a single cable. I wish they would have stuck to that concept instead of re-introducing obsolete ports on their recent models. 4 TB ports + headphone jack was perfect!
Again, that’s the issue.
But why? No one is forcing you to buy their products if you don’t think they are worth the price. But a lot of people do and we didn’t need to be “tricked”.
Did you just claim that not having ports is a feature? Lol
If you weren’t being facetious about that, I think you might’ve had too much of that Apple Kool-Aid.
…which is actually probably a flavour of Kool-Aid, lmao
I think your knowledge is a bit dated? MacBook Pros have had HDMI ports since the M1 release in 2021.
I didn’t say they did or didn’t have HDMI ports. The comment I replied to said it’s a feature that you can buy a dongle to get the ports you need
EDIT: And in another comment, they say HDMI is a legacy port, so I’m guessing they don’t consider having an HDMI port to be a feature, lol
Yes, not having legacy ports taking up space is a feature.
I think you might’ve had too much of that Apple Kool-Aid.
Repeating tropes sure is great if you don’t have arguments.
Yes, not having legacy ports taking up space is a feature.
This is the first time I’ve heard this in my entire life! Thank you for that.
HDMI is not a legacy port; it’s still a commonly-used display standard.
Also, a dongle takes up extra space compared to simply having a port built-in.
I have a MacBook Air that I connect to any of my screens through HDMI using a plethora of sub-20USD USB-C docks that are not made by Apple. I use the same docks for my other laptops. Would I make my MacBook Air bigger to have more ports in it? Fuck no, keep it tiny and put the ports on a SEVENTEEN US DOLLAR DOCK so I don’t need to put the motherfucka on life support every time I want to use my keyboard/mouse/monitor/external SSD/10key/controller/DAC
I plug one cable in and it all works (and charges at 100w!)
If I’m traveling and want to plug in a flash drive but don’t want to use a dock that’s less than half the size of a phone? My travel bag has USB A-to-c (and C-to-A) converters. Plug that wired bitch right in.
I’ve watched enough old Louis Rossmann videos to know their products are garbage. They might have good CPU but rest is designed and put together like a fresh turd
Are those videos around the 2016-2019 MacBooks? Because yeah, Apple massively dropped a bollock with those things.
But I’m at a point where I’m genuinely pondering whether a fully-specced 2015 MacBook Pro running Linux might be a great replacement for the M2 MacBook Air I currently use, once it dies on me, or Apple drop support (whichever comes first (which will be the dropped support, guaranteed)). I said in another comment on here that I still have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home, running Debian, still trucking along as well as the day I bought it. My home server is a 2014 Mac mini (also running Debian) that’s my Jellyfin/Navidrome/Grimmory/Lidarr/QBittorrent server, all with just 8gb of soldered RAM, drawing very little power while doing it.
Apple have many, many problems, but the build quality of their hardware ain’t one.
Are those videos around the 2016-2019 MacBooks?
Yep, exactly that period. Repair vids of these MacBooks were how Louis grew into big well known youtuber with millions of views at some point.
As someone who migrated from android pixel to an all in Apple ecosystem I’ll provide my context. As a software developer for cloud most of my software runs in Linux, so having a platform that mirrors it pretty closely is a plus, in addition to being a sturdy and performant coding machine, development on a windows laptop has always been far clunkier and unstable comparatively to my Mac experience. From there a person recommended I get an Apple TV to get away from my Samsung smart TV integrations that were dog shit slow, this was a vast improvement plus I could mirror my laptop to the tv easily.
From there I decided I wanted to do some pen drawing on a tablet, and I looked into things like remarkable etc but my experience with android tablets with pens was lackluster so I went with a iPad Pro with the pencil and it has been a great experience, the fact that it can seamlessly be controlled by the MacBook was pretty stunning the first time I accidentally discovered that feature. Follow that up with being able to plug in the iPad and have it be a 2nd display and it has been a great companion to the MacBook.
I got my wife a iPad Air as well and she loved it so when it came time to upgrade our phones I looked at my history with android, of my last 4 android pixel devices all 4 of them had to be recalled either for a bricked scenario from a patch or battery expansion. I decided I might as well give the iPhone a try, this also allowed my wife to have a universal computing experience as she could open tabs on her phone then migrate to the tablet seamlessly.
When I got the iPhones I decided to get their AirPod pros as well since I heard they can pretty easily transition(without button press) between devices easily, and that it has hearing aid grade audio enhancement(I am old and have bad hearing in certain scenarios. The user tailored enhanced hearing was game changing in certain environments and the transitioning between devices has been in all but 1 scenario a great experience(for some reason my iPhone 16 and the AirPods don’t always get along, requiring a phone restart to get them to operate).
Android auto vs CarPlay is personal preference but I find CarPlay to be a bit more sleek and easier to navigate and more performant.
So the trick at least for me has been how seamlessly it all fits together, the hardware quality and polish(aside from the iPhone/airpod thing that does annoy me pretty hard) and the reduction in overhead I have. Instead of dealing with windows 11 bloat and spyware, android device quality and occasional patching problems, a TV that runs like dogshit because it’s using old phone hardware to drive the experience, I can instead focus on what I want to do with the hardware, it just makes me more productive, less admin work, more time to create.
Time will tell I suppose if I feel the same way when my current stack ages out of the support window, but overall I prefer the low maintenance I encounter with this setup so I can focus my efforts on my docker swarm and other facets of my homelab.
It may be hard to believe, but some people actually buy apple products because they like them.
Personally, I don’t get why the solution to many of the issues people experience with Apple devices is to buy another one.
Yes, this is only a subset of people and the Internet shows you the worst of them, but I still find it a little hard to believe somebody reasonably suggests to purchases another device that costs so much!
Personally, I don’t get why the solution to many of the issues people experience with Apple devices is to buy another one.
I’m not really familiar with this. My wife uses a macbook. She’s had it for 6 years and I can’t recall any real issues with it.
Just from my personal experiences when I was using an iPhone several years ago, as well as whatI have seen on the Internet
They dont like them in any meaningful way, they are shiny, they are used to them and everyone they know has one. That is the size of it.
To re-phrase for the cheap seats people are willing to pay for familiarity and ease of use within a contained and overwatched environment. This demographic will make the transition to AI guardianship with barely a blip on the resistance scale. I am not being derogatory, it is probably the smart move.
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Apple has always designed things for people who want to do things without having to be a technologist. For which I will always credit them, massively.
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Apple has always designed things to work together seamlessly. Again, massive kudos, even though I condemn their using this to lock people in.
Then there’s Job’s cult of personality, marketing Apple as for people who are better than the plebes.
I’ve never been a fan of Apple as a company, but I’ve always given massive credit for the good ideas behind making things that just work.
Or creating the myth it just works. As someone that supports corporate macs this is definitely a myth.
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