My thoughts on macOS vs Linux

macOS Developer Forum macOS Chat/Discussions
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Privileged people with no real problems complaining that the machines aren’t doing everything by themselves, then?

To be fair, Android vendors have been MUCH more guilty of throttling phones long before they physically expire. I’ve had 5 Samsung phones and they all started lagging like clockwork between the 6th and 9th month mark.

Five devices from different generations and with different builds suffering the same problems is a much better proof for malice than some guys casually chatting why their phones can’t serve them breakfast, I think.

Neither do I. I think we should accept that all sides have their anecdotal evidence.

I’ve been on both sides however. Apple is scummy, like all corporations. :man_shrugging: But their devices are of high quality and the hate they get seems to mostly come from people who can’t afford them, and people who just blindly agree with their friends.

To me both sides suck, but Apple sucks little less. :laughing:

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Well, maybe it’s time for government-sponsored open source efforts. Because capitalism never aligns with the needs of the customers.

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Are the batteries expensive? I always paid about 30 EUR for both the service of exhanging the battery and the battery itself.

Oh, I wish. But we seriously have no choice. Speaking in terms of technical and design excellence, only the Chinese phones like Xiaomi and Huawei are a solid competition to Apple – and are much cheaper – but then you give up all your personal data, and maybe even voice and screen and camera recordings – to the Chinese Communist Party.

Don’t want to be the doomsayer here but if something doesn’t change soon, we are heading to very dark times. There’s barely any choice and the big entities are well-aware of that and started very visibly exercising their gatekeeping and market-cornering powers.

This is predicted for at least 5 years now with zero signs that it will ever happen. :frowning:

Never going to happen. We will just eventually move on, maybe even to not having a smartphone.

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I mentioned it before… but:

Who knows, maybe if enough people get behind it?

That’s harsh Dimi :stuck_out_tongue:

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I generalized a bit, I agree. but I’ve been physically around those water coolers where colleagues chat and hop on hate bandwagons and it becomes “cool” to do it because you want to be popular in the company. “Dude, my iPhone is lagging!”, “Yeah! They suck!” etc. Honestly, that’s kindergarten stuff.

As a guy who never cared to adhere to tribal rules and almost always has been the odd one out, I am less than impressed by random people hating on Apple without ever giving any concrete argument or evidence.

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Yeah you can get that, though I think we see a lot less of it these days - purely because it just takes so much energy and people can get their ‘fix’ much easier just by going on social media platforms and posting silly political stuff :rofl:

I certainly don’t think that’s the case for Paulo, he works in security and many of his points are valid and also held by many Mac users. As a Mac user myself I do feel he’s missing some of what attracts people to the Mac, and I think that’s a shame, but if he’s made his mind up about not wanting to give Apple products a go I am not going to try to convince him. I’ve been very happy in my choice (and I hope he is happy in his too) and it’s only these last few years where Apple have really let themselves down. I hope they sort it soon :blush:

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I’ve no beef with @Exadra37, in fact I find our back-and-forths interesting and grounding (each of both sides can get carried away and having a polar opposite of your opinion helps).

That being said, I am getting the vibe he’s quick to jump on the hate bandwagon without citing any actual facts – and that can rub me the wrong way. I do agree with his technical arguments otherwise.

None of that means I am an Apple fanboy. I think we here know that I am not. I made very objective analysis and I am still happy with my choice – problem is that some of the positives’ value starts to diminish with time.

Which I think is the core of this discussion here: are we still happy with our choice? I am, but I can see things going in a bad direction with time.

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Paulo has posted some good links to support his views Dimi, eg:

Yes he might massage things for effect a tiny little bit but that’s something we can all be guilty of. My best advice is if you are confident in your choices don’t let things rub you up the wrong way :upside_down_face: and if somebody does post something that is inaccurate, it should be easy enough to put forward facts to show where they might be wrong, or just simply ask for clarification with something like “I find that hard to believe, do you have any links to support those claims?” Usually that is enough :nerd_face:

You can get a little bit defensive tho Dimi :laughing: and in the same way that massaging facts to support a viewpoint can weaken it, becoming defensive can do the same too.

I think this is why I try to remain chilled and try not getting defensive (especially about inaminate objects). Few things rile me these days. I must get getting old :rofl:

I am not currently :cry: Actually let me rephrase that, I am VERY happy with my choice (/what I decided to buy) - this machine is absolutely amazing - but I am NOT happy with how Apple have effectively throttled it. Either by not caring (which is bad enough) or by purposely doing it so that people rush out and spend thousands on their new M series Macs. Both of these cases are really really bad, especially when their products cost so much and they pride themselves as a company that cares about their customers.

I sincerely hope someone from Apple is listening and that they do actually care, and sort these problems out.

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Fair, I’ll defer to your judgement since historically I’ve observed you are more objective than me on these matters.

It seems I am phrasing my arguments badly: I never wanted to seem defensive. I am not insecure about my choices at all. I am a grown man who can analyse pros and cons of what he’s buying and make an informed choice. I too, like @AstonJ , can’t be moved by somebody’s opinion if what I use is bad or whatever.

What makes me jump a bit however is that this is a forum: other people might come and take these subjective and “massaged” views as the objective truth. The world suffers enough from misinformation! Let’s not contribute further to the problem.

Harshly put, I think we should all strive to write like emotionless robots on these matters.

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Let me rephrase my criticism to @Exadra37 better (hopefully):

I agree with the linked article – but not with the title: “your computer is not yours”. Apple never locked me out of my account and told me “do X if you want to get back control of your machine”. Hence, the title is false and the article loses some of its credibility because of it. Same goes for “slow by design” – we don’t know that for a fact, we haven’t snooped on internal Apple meetings. My opinion is that they are just negligent towards macOS since iPhones and iPads and servive subscriptions make more money.

If people want to get articles taken seriously they should avoid sensational titles.

Apple is not forcing anyone. It encourages you to do it but you can postpone it for quite a while. Why would a security researcher like @Exadra37 recommend this though? Isn’t keeping your devices up to date a best security practice? This reply:

…is not giving any objective info. All corporations have agendas. :man_shrugging:

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence of the opposite which makes this statement not an universal truth (I have my doubts if it’s even a partial truth). Slowdown might happen to some after an update. For them we have to seek other reasons first IMO – like degraded batteries or too much apps working in the background.

It’s unrealistic to expect the current generation of Li-Ion batteries to last forever. Here’s a relatively recent one: The Charging Cycles of Lithium-ion Polymer Batteries. This is not an Apple-specific problem.

Is that better, @AstonJ? I tried. :slight_smile:

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Do you mean can or can’t :laughing:

I can personally be swayed with good argument no matter how much I might have liked something. While I do feel an attachment to Apple products, they are still, ultimately inanimate objects and I could (we all probably could) easily become just as attached to an equally well made/executed replacement.

You tried and that’s what matters Dimi :kissing_heart:

However if you would like honest feedback, then it probably still reads a teeny bit defensive - not that it is against or rules or anything like that, it just detracts from points you may otherwise make. But lets not go on about it. I want to comment on some of your points instead :nerd_face:

This could just be how different people interpret things Dimi.

If Apple are doing things on my machine without my consent, such as stealing data, information, usage statistics or anything like that then I would very much agree with people saying your Mac isn’t really yours. This is something where I think we need better laws - and I mean proper laws that are there to actually protect us (and not give govt agencies powers to spy on us).

My issue with Apple here is that any Apple employee who is a Mac user with even half a brain cell would be able to spot the difference between my computer when it was new one year ago and what it is like now were the actually living with the product like I am. The difference is stark and unmissable, and I don’t think it is only affecting me (I’ve heard from numerous others experiencing the same).

That, to me, means only one of two things:

  1. Their team is incredibly incompetent
  2. They are actually purposely doing it or know about it and are allowing it because it means people will buy new Macs

I put the latter two together as they equate to the same thing to me.

Does that better explain why I’m so annoyed with them? Haven’t you noticed a slow down on your machines at all? In fact I am going to screen-record opening an app now to time it and and see if I can upload it anywhere :rofl:

That’s no excuse in my opinion… They are the richest company in the world and there is no reason why they should be neglecting products that they sell for thousands of pounds…

I would generally agree but it’s so common now, and in topics like this it doesn’t bother me. If it were a different topic, for example say about Elixir or Erlang then that would be different because it can hurt those languages. People are used to all sorts of nonsense being spoken about Macs/PCs so it has much less impact and effect. Imo anyway…

I’ll post that video now… you will be shocked!

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Here ya go - it took OVER 30 seconds to open!!!

This is a Mac with 64GB ram!!! :cry:

Now you can probably see why I am so angry with them :ghost: the same apps used to open practically instantly when I first got this machine :sob:

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Can’t, not in the emotional sense anyway. If showed good arguments I know I can change my mind exactly like you described it. I am not in love with my iDevices. They simply do their job well.

I do want an honest feedback but that’s the best I can do today. :man_shrugging:

Agreed because you are factually correct about interpretation, disagreed because these read like regular clickbait titles which remove credibility for a chunk of the population (and I am in that group).

It does but you might still miss other pieces of the picture. F.ex., have you replaced your Mac’s battery? Have you made a clean install? Mind you I’d never reinstall my iMac Pro from scratch so the latter option might not be an option for you at all (like for me). But let’s be honest, OS-es crap the bed here and there and as much as I wanted that to be not true, macOS is not an exception… :confused:

No disagreement. I am simply explaining it because things in big organizations usually happen in a very predictable manner – there are entire books describing the phases through which these entities go. Just trying to be a realist.

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Oh well, but that can be due to a ton of factors, namely the program itself – IMO that’s 99% likely. Not an excuse, sure, but not sure it can be correlated with the quality of the entire Mac?

I see what you did there! :rofl: Clickbaity!

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It’s a brand new Mac - I shouldn’t need to replace the battery so soon (the battery in my MBA lasted for a very long time).

Why wouldn’t you do do a clean install? They have traditionally been the best way to get your Mac running like new again :smiley:

It’s not the only app that does it unfortunately. I have reported all these issues to Apple so I hope they fix things in the next release because it’s making me hate my Mac :cry: (it’s possible a clean install would fix it, but I am not going to do that now until the next release of Big Sur).

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Because I installed so much! Getting back to everyday productivity levels would take a full weekend with 10h work a day and it might not still be enough… I am actually terrified of the possibility.

From here on I’ll be focusing on learning tools that snapshot the state of your OS – mostly which programs you installed and how does your home directory differ from a brand new one – but I haven’t done it for this machine and if I have to reinstall from scratch I might as well resign from work, honestly…

Have you tried adding those apps to Settings → Security & Privacy → Privacy → Developer tools? A long shot, granted, but people have reported faster working shells after white-listing them there (and I white-listed my 3 console programs there as well).

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I’m curious… what have you got installed? And what do you use for email? (Email is the biggest pita if you use SMTP/POP - i.e where all your mail is stored on your machine.)

I haven’t, but will look into it - thanks for the suggestion :blush:

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Ah, Apple Mail.

By “installed a lot” I mean a ton of dev tools and utilities. I mean I can always do this:

brew list --formula -1 --full-name >~/OneDrive/main_machine_brew.list
brew list --cask -1 --full-name >~/OneDrive/main_machine_brew_cask.list

…and then use those on a new machine. But it’s still rather laborious.

There are some tools that could help, like emplace but haven’t tried them yet.

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I think you might find it’s not too bad doing a clean install, you just usually need:

  • All your data (can often be done by simply copying your home folder)
  • A list of all your programs and any settings etc

Generally I have found that doing a clean install is the best thing for a performance boost. However on a few occasions it has done what this machine is doing (very slow on certain tasks) and doing a reinstall again has fixed it (so I wonder if there’s a bug with the installer, or whether they do AB testing of something - because it has happened a number of times).

I just wish they’d hurry up and release the next version of Big Sur!

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Well all of that is true but it won’t happen over an hour, would it? It’s a rhetorical question, I know it won’t. :frowning:

Don’t just assume that people have 6h to throw away on that and that they’ll sing happily while doing it. I might be getting old but I want my machines functional. The constant required grooming is becoming extremely tiring and irksome to me lately.

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