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Comment by brailsafe | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I feel bad for most people who ended up with a 4gb macbook, and Apple should feel some shame for continuing to sell them for so long, not terribly unlike the Vista debacle. 4gb was an awful choice already in 2014, and since 16gb was (I think) the max and still kinda mid, that was the obvious choice; 8GB would have still been fine for an average user. I have no idea if 64gb is the obvious choice now, but the upgrade is so obscenely expensive that I'll be holding onto my intel thing for a while longer. Not as long as I can, but until the cost to value ratio becomes more compelling, or something like a cellular modem comes around.

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It's about price detection. If you offer several versions of a product to discover the maximum reach consumer is willing to pay, then the cheapest versions need to be meaningfully worse to drive those who can pay to the me expensive versions.

True, but at a certain point you're just selling a shitty product with no longevity and justifying with behavioral manipulation for profit. Same with the 16gb iPad or meager iCloud drive storage tiers. They were fine I guess when they first came out, whatever, but the legitimacy of that tier shouldn't have lasted more than a small number of years

They finally catered to devs in the last few years but it’s already too late for many of us because macOS is garbage now. The ARM transition makes it worse. I use Linux now.

> The ARM transition makes it worse.

No idea what you mean. The M1 MacBook Air is the best machine Apple has produced for years and finally convinced me to update my old personal laptop. The battery life is insane despite the performance being better than any of the high end Windows laptop I have used for work during the past decade. Plus it was correctly priced at launch which is very rare for Apple which usually extremely overprices everything.

Ya I'm not sure where people are coming up with this extreme opinion. If they go to linux, maybe they're just trying to follow a path that's been restricted through layers of system protection or something. One of my only gripes with new macbook pros is just that the ram feels insultingly expensive, and to go past 32gb you have to upgrade the CPU (all in it's over $1000 to get there).

Yeah it’s top-tier hardware, but the software limits it. My main issue has been with Docker, which has been discussed to death here on HN in various threads.

Very much disagree, there's not a chance in hell I'd choose linux over macos and imo—with a few exceptions—it's better than ever, and gradually becoming a more approachable platform to build things for.

Although I'm fine with linux for server, when something breaks it can be a massive pain in the ass to track down why, until you've spent years day-in-day-out troubleshooting particular software to the point you know immediately what the issue is. This just doesn't happen at all for me personally on macOS in everyday use.

I was listening to a Python podcast a few months ago where they were hating on macOS/Macs and it really resonated with me. They were saying it was becoming a common sentiment to move away from Macs, and this is after their throttling issues seen in Intel macs.

Anyway they’re just opinions. I can list the reasons macOS makes my life harder, or doesn’t do things it used to do, for example display scaling on 1440p displays, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, because it works for you!

What do you mean by display scaling on 1440p displays? I'm using a 2560x1600 display atm but it's just running at native resolution.

I'm not here to vehemently defend macOS, and ultimately it is just my opinion and personal experience, but I see a lot of "macOS isn't what it used to be" or complaints about some specific gripe. They do happen rarely, but I've used other OSes and don't see how they'd be more compelling. What's on the list for you?

So you won’t be able to scale the display, meaning 2x all UI elements. You used to be able to, but Apple removed that feature in the last couple of years. There was a sort of hackey workaround you could do on x86 macs, but it doesn’t work on ARM macs. It’s just dumb man. All I can fathom is they want to sell more “5K” displays.

I find it harder than ever to just do stuff. SIP makes things harder, and I get that it improves security, but software engineers don’t care for stuff like that that just gets in our way. Gatekeeper used to be just a mild inconvenience.

If I want to downgrade a Mac that’s on a beta version of macOS, I have to have another Mac, connect that Mac to it, and run software to “restore” it. I can’t just plug in a flash drive with the macOS version I want.

Night Light doesn’t work on DisplayLink displays. No real reason for that.

It’s 2023 and I still can’t adjust the brightness or volume of external displays (sometimes it works with something like Lunar). This is shit that Windows and Linux have been doing for 15+ years.

Not a lot of people know this but DisplayPort Daisy Chaining doesn’t work on macOS. Not supported. Never will be.

Screen recording doesn’t include audio. I’m sure there’s a way around it but come on.

Why is macOS garbage now? I am considering buying a Mac, can I reliably use Linux on it without hitting hardware related issues all the time?

You should just buy the mac and find out, then return it if not. They have a good 14-day return window that I use occasionally for a similar purpose.

I think Asahi has come a pretty long way but idk quite how far.

Why do you feel macOS is garbage?

GP said macOS is garbage, not me. I can't believe it is garbage for the average consumer. It's Apple after all.

Yeah it seems decent enough for non-devs but iCloud has always been buggy for me and everyone I know that uses it. I don’t have a Mac anymore but I do have an iPhone.

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