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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

What I think a lot of us programmers miss is the experience of the end-users who are likely to buy a Mac.

The fact of the matter is, 99.9% of people who buy a Mac are not going to know what subpixel hinting is. Or care too much that they can't delete Chess.app. To them, the Mac is nicer looking and easier to use than ever.

Will iOS devs care? Not at all - developing for the Mac has become easier with Catalyst. It's easy and cheap to get a new audience for your apps. Will web devs care? Not while homebrew and all of the packages in it still work fine. I, as a web dev, have everything working great on the Big Sur beta already.

And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has changed.

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And I’ll continue to buy them.

Why? Because I have better things to do with my time than fiddle with my OS, and because it’s still Unix like without having an awful user experience.

And my employers will continue to buy macs for me for largely similar reasons. My last colleague who tried to use Linux literally never got their laptop to work with the WiFi authentication, so they had to wire in.

Meh, I just load up manjaro with XFCE and call it a day. Not much fiddling involved, very little about the user experience that I don't like.

Only thing I ever really tweaked was running a more up-to-date kernel for an old soundcard I used to use. Which took a couple of clicks.

Sorry for your colleague who had trouble with wifi, but. /shrug

Been running Manjaro Linux for 2 years now on 2 desktop workstations and 1 laptop. No fiddling needed. Everything just works. (I had to install one utility called libinput-gestures to use multi-touch gestures on the laptop.)

Matter of fact, my life is easier with this setup than it ever was with macOS or Windows since every piece of software I need is in the package manager including official Chrome, Slack, Thunderbird, Zoom, Beyond Compare, VS Code, Node.js, .NET Core, Docker, MySQL Workbench, Azure Data Studio and many, many, many more...

I avoided Linux for years because every time I tried, it would break but Manjaro/XFCE never broke once on me. I can't recommend it enough. So glad I'm no longer a slave to Apple or Microsoft.

Buying a laptop to run manjaro is a minefield. I have had some Just Work. Those were generally older laptops without dedicated graphics. I have had newer laptops fail to properly switch between graphics, rip through my battery, not reconnect to wifi after waking up forcing me to shut down and boot up every time I wanted it to sleep, have middling to poor touchpad drivers, not have the webcam work out of the box. For those who get lucky, great. For those that want to fix that stuff, which is sometimes easy, sometimes hard, other times nearly impossible without writing drivers yourself, good for them too. I don't want any of that.

I tried manjaro after living on debian based distros for most of my life. I somehow ended up in dependency hell after only a month.

That's a good point.

I think the Arch wiki is a good resource for this. My laptop is listed here - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Acer_Aspire_E5-575

I have the exceptionally cheap Acer E5-575g model (quad core i5) with RAM upgraded to 32gb and a 500gb Samsung EVO ssd. The touchpad is an Elantech.

If anyone knows another good site, please let me know - I'll be shopping for an upgrade early next year.

Exactly this. Let’s assume you have a computer because it helps you in getting tasks done.

In Windows, antivirus bloatware and ads in your start menu stand between you and that goal. Third party software is often of very disputable quality and design.

In Linux, it’s always a surprise what thing/dependency is suddenly broken on this boot, and what arcane commands I need to fix it.

On macOS generally I boot my machine, click on the app I need to perform my task, the app will be of sufficient to very good quality, I do my task and I’m done.

> And as for some saying that MacOS is becoming more iOS like: Yes, it's been happening since Mac OS X Lion with the fullscreen Launchpad. Nothing has changed.

I'd say a lot has changed, because everything is a matter of degrees. As soon as I realized Launchpad was a piece of crap, I put an Applications folder stack in my dock a la the Leopard default, and forgot that Launchpad exists.

Can't really ignore it anymore...

You can also just right-click the Launchpad icon on the Dock.

My solution is to just use Spotlight Search to launch everything. My hands are on the keyboard much more than a mouse or touchpad, and it's a good habit for when I switch between the laptop (where the touchpad is more convenient) and a desktop setup where they're more physically separated. Hunting for things on a screen with a cursor is tedious and annoying to me, when I can always just type it. But maybe that's a habit from growing up with MSDOS and (later) Linux and FreeBSD starting in college.

Spotlight search is one of the only patterns I really took away from using a mac for work.

I even mapped Super (win key) + Space to the application finder in XFCE. It's just muscle memory at this point, just like the vim keybindings.

And, really, any excuse to use the mouse less is a win.

It looked like Launchpad was not in the Big Sur install. It wasn’t in the docks for the demos. I suspect that it as been deprecated if not fully retired.

I’m also seeing UI elements from MacOS coming to iPads in the sidebar components they are adding.

I've been using a MacBook for ~5 years full-time for all sorts of development (including frontend JavaScript, backend APIs, big data involving hadoop, etc.) and I've never used launchpad. I don't see why it can't be ignored? I don't even have it in my menu bar.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

Launchpad can absolutely still be ignored†, but the overall iOS-ization of macOS cannot be. It is ever-present, in every part of the system.

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† If it even still exists in macos 11.

The median user who sees their computer as a means to an end is using Windows and saves $300+ doing so and ends up with a computer that stays cool even if it clogs up with dust after a while.

Or they end up like my parents, who had the screen hinge break off on a $400 HP laptop just from daily opening and closing after only a year and a half.

Or you end up like my dad who nearly couldn't open a Bid Document because Windows randomly decided to deregister Word's file extensions and spit out an "Unspecified Error" whenever he tried to open a file.

The point is, you are very eager to ignore the flaws of the other side.

That's a very silly anecdote when so many people in the past 2 years had the keyboards on their $2000+ Macbook Pros break within a year.

And it's an HP, we all know they are terrible.

Yes, but at least Apple paid for the repair. HP had no mercy for the hinge.

Tell me, outside of a Thinkpad, are there really any good Windows brands? Microsoft's Surface division just opened a repair program because the glass on their screens was spontaneously cracking.

When my son burned his Dell's CPU and mobo while carelessly overclocking it, Dell sent a tech guy to my house the next day with the parts and replaced it on-site for free. No questions asked.

My limited time on Earth is worth a lot and Dell seems to acknowledge that.

The problems I have faced with my 2018 MacBook Pro that make me dread working with it (I have to due my job) are not development issues but mostly end-user ones: https://ivanca.tumblr.com/post/615979862803562496/15-flaws-o...

> I know you can Opt+Cmd+V but thats not the point, which is extremely poor UI/UX.

Cutting files is generally bad UX, and Windows (which has the function) handles it rather awkwardly. To be honest many of these issues you point out are tenets of macOS since the very first release of 10.0 and in many cases earlier.

> Cutting files is generally bad UX

Says who? Apple? Where was it established to be "bad ux"? 30 years using it on Windows and have yet to find anything awkward about cutting files.

Because on Windows the functionality is semantically inconsistent.

When you cut text you are removing it from one place and pasting it into another. As soon as you choose the action the text disappears.

When you cut a file nothing happens to the file unless you paste it somewhere - and for good reason, it would be insanity for a file to disappear in a similar manner and when the majority of uses for this function are to simply move a file (something most modern filesystems can handle quite gracefully) it would also be insanity to copy the file from the filesystem into RAM and then back into the filesystem.

The macOS paradigm makes more literal sense - you copy the file and then you can choose to either paste it somewhere or move it to another location.

Text on buffers are disposable (e.g. cut/pasting text) but files are not, as losing one can even be a tragedy without backup so I don't see much logic in treating them the same, specially since the mental overhead becomes a burden to the user (oh I'm pasting a file so I must remember to use the special command to cut a file) instead of putting the burden on the machine, specially since reducing mental overhead is arguably the sole purpose of the machine.

And the focus of that complain was that the edit menu does not clarify in any way that the "Cut" command there is only meant for text, it should be renamed "Cut text" or something that the user can easily understand to be intended only for text.

Overheating is still a concern for me.

I recently purchased a new 13" pro, upgraded to the top processor. I installed Bootcamp and played hours of The Witcher 3 (on low settings, of course, but still). There were no overheating issues. Fan was going full blast the whole time, but it kept up just fine. Hopefully my little anecdote instills a little confidence. The new 13" is as close to a perfect machine to me as I have ever owned. It's compact, portable, light but a completely full powered functional 100% dev workhorse (with a great keyboard AND a physical escape key to boot). I couldn't be happier. Kudos to Apple for this one.

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