Comment by 10729287
5 months ago
There are so many bugs and even more poor ergonomic choices that have been unfixed for years on Apple Devices. It's fascinating considering the whole cult regarding the company's so called attention to details.
5 months ago
There are so many bugs and even more poor ergonomic choices that have been unfixed for years on Apple Devices. It's fascinating considering the whole cult regarding the company's so called attention to details.
It’s because despite those issues, depressingly macOS still delivers an experience that to most Mac users is preferable over that of Linux or especially Windows. Increasingly it’s not that macOS is incredible, but that the alternatives are that much worse.
And I say this as someone who uses Windows and Linux daily alongside macOS. Windows isn’t going to get any better so long as Microsoft’s betting on pushing services on users to make money and while desktop Linux is better than ever it still has a ways to go to make it unquestionably better across the board for more than a small subset of users.
It’s actually quite similar to why people buy MacBooks. Generic PC laptops nearly all involve one or more major tradeoffs in day to day use, with none being as good all-rounders as MacBooks even if individual specs don’t measure up.
I was an original Mac user (first computer ever bought) and was thinking this type of stuff too. My Windows experience was from schools, friends' computers or later client's computers.
Nowadays I had both but use a Windows PC quite a lot (was destined to be a hackintosh, but couldn't put up with the hassle later one) and the reason I use Windows more is precisely because I have found it to be more stable, less annoying and with less bugs usually.
I have a loaded Intel Mac Mini along and the audio bugs keeps happening on this system, I have particularly nasty crackling that is impossible to debug and particularly annoying for a machine of this price (and I can't swap the mobo like I could if it were a PC).
The Apple reputation is largely underserved nowadays and I find it frustrating because it is one of the reasons they use to justify their absurdly high pricing.
Considering those bugs are still not fixed in Apple Silicon Mac's, I am pretty sure this is a combination of bad software maintenance and poor hardware design, even though they pretend they know better.
Considering the price of their computers, it is unacceptable but to be honest it won't be my problem anymore because I'm not buying anything else from Apple for the foreseeable future.
MacOS is nice and had some cool stuff back in the days, but now Windows can offer an almost 1to1 alternative, at a much better price with much less hardware issues. If you put as much money into a PC than you do in a Mac, the warranty will outlast the Apple support for the equivalent Mac which is kind of funny considering the prices...
> Generic PC laptops nearly all involve one or more major tradeoffs in day to day use, with none being as good all-rounders as MacBooks even if individual specs don’t measure up.
This also applies to smartphones. No matter the aspect, some specialty Android is 10x as good as your iPhone. However, it'll have bizarre drawbacks. iPhones are popular because they have right default balance for the broad audience out of the box.
In my experience, people tend to say that macOS "looks good". I have not spoken with a mac user who said that macOS is more usable or the workflows are more productive. Also, Apple has convinced everyone that they always know what they are doing, so when something is wrong in the OS it's users who think they must be doing something wrong.
But with Microsoft turning Windows into a big advertising billboard, I can see it becoming a valid reason.
Mac is more useable and productive than windows. The comes from someone who’s worked in both. And games on windows.
Apart from MS's obsessive Bing pushing, I'd say Windows is easily better than macOS. Explorer beats Finder, PWA/Chrome profile support is nicer, window manager is better, archives are handled natively, touchpad gestures for eg. virtual desktops on small laptops are competitive. With a normal mouse, middle click for eg. hold to drag just isn't supported. The natural scroll settings for mouse and trackpad are bound, when you'd usually want them to be the opposite of each other.
As far as I know, iCloud is less well-featured than OneDrive.
As a recent MBA owner, the only thing I think Apple nails is hardware. The battery life and low power use are amazing and there's something to be said for Apple's ability to force-move devs to ARM.
The rest, not really. The OS is aggressively mid, as the kids would say.
...okay. Apple still makes native apps. That counts for something.
A lot of that is subjective. For me for example, Explorer vs. Finder is mostly a wash with Finder edging out Explorer in a few ways (e.g. toggling hidden file visibility with the key shortcut ⌘⇧. instead of having to dive into settings), and Windows window management is grating to the point that I have to keep a hard low limit on the number of programs open to get anything done under it. Archives are handled natively on macOS too, and I install 7zip on Windows anyway because its multithreaded compression/decompression is way faster than stock. Cloud storage is moot because I barely use it.
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MacOS and Windows are, in my honest opinion, significantly less consistent experiences than Gnome. The list I have on MacOS UX annoyances, design inconsistencies and implementation bugs is in the hundreds.
GNOME is very consistent, but the downside is that it’s not great in terms of power user features and progressive disclosure thereof. In some ways it’s also more mobile-inclined, it’s basically what one would get if they took iPadOS and applied some adaptations for desktop usage.
Some of that consistency is also undone when it’s necessary to run Electron or Qt apps. Anki for example is a real pain if you’re using fractional scaling under Wayland, because GNOME’s refusal to implement server side decorations forces Anki to run with an ugly generic titlebar and no shadow. macOS is better here, with all programs getting the system default window treatment unless they request otherwise.
That "cult" and "attention to details" was a long time ago, when Steve Jobs was CEO. But even then there were many bugs, like the .DS_Store files, which never got fixed. It got much worse when Tim Cook took over. Now I only use macOS because the next best thing is still worse, and also the Mac hardware became really good with the switch to ARM (after a long long dark time with x86 where the hardware got worse and worse with each iteration).
I wish .DS_Store files were automatically gitignored...
(though why should git fix such a stupid problem it didn't create...)
Pretty easy with a global gitignore
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Attention to detail, but only when they can market/advertise it, perhaps?