Leaving the Apple ecosystem behind

by recvonline • 5 years ago

511 487 5 years ago

rvz• 5 years ago

Good. To each to their own. Maybe your use case is different from others and the OS you moved from somehow got in your way.

In my case; time wasted is money lost and with no money made means affordability becomes a problem.

The best OS platform ecosystem I use is the one that not only saves time, but also saves me spending money whilst continuing to make me the most money.

bhaak2• 5 years ago

Arch is not something for people that want to just use their devices. It's something for people who love to tinker.

Updates break something so often that I wonder if it somehow is sponsored by other OS developers to make them look good.

rusticpenn• 5 years ago

That's part of the arch experience.

Grollicus• 5 years ago

I'm running Arch on my home laptop and my server. Had one breakage in ~5 years where sshd wouldn't start anymore because they deprecated and then removed a config option. What do you do that regularly breaks?

ericwooley• 5 years ago

Been running it almost a year now, without anything breaking except some gnome extensions.

horsawlarway• 5 years ago

I mostly agree with you that Arch is for folks who love to tinker.

But you must have some strange workflows going - I've been on arch fulltime for 3 years now, and my one breakage was that dash-to-dock didn't play nicely with a new version of gnome.

Frankly - it's a far better experience than the 16inch macbook pro my work issued me - that has problems with fans, problems with lag during zoom calls, problems with accelerated rendering in chrome, issues with wifi and bluetooth connections. I literally call it my crapbook it's so bad.

bhaak2• 5 years ago

What I didn't know in the beginning (coming from Gentoo) was that Arch doesn't support updating specific packages. That explained some of my initial problems but I still have regular breakages.

Right now my sound is broken and it stayed broken even after an update and reboot (That you have to reboot so often is something else that bothers me. Rebooting a Linux/Unix machine feels so wrong).

Your MacBook problems sound like hardware problems. That's not something I would expect from any decent laptop these days.

worble2• 5 years ago

Been running it for a few years now, I can only remember two or three times which have required manual intervention (and even then it was a one liner described on the arch news page).

Compared to the hell that was upgrading Ubuntu versions every couple of years, I'll take Arch's way any day.

wayneftw• 5 years ago

Manjaro is and that's based on Arch. They curate the updates for you to prevent breakages and the need to tinker endlessly.

I've been running it for 3 years on 4 machines and I've had far less breakage from updates than with my Windows or Mac machines.

entropea3• 5 years ago

Manjaro is one of the only distro's I've used that has nuked itself during updates. I moved to Endeavor because I was sick of the Manjaro maintained repos.

i_use_arch_btw• 5 years ago

I've been daily-driving Arch for two years now, and I've only seen it break a handful of times. And since I set it up using the command line tools, I knew which ones to use to fix it.

Arch lets me engage with the open-source community directly and get fixes to issues faster than more curated OSes like Ubuntu. I have access to more diagnostic information and tools that what Windows provides. And privacy and freedom isn't compromised like on MacOS.

Also, it's gotten really good for games. It plays pretty much everything I've wanted to play, from Stellaris, Cyberpunk 2077, and Humankind.

So, sometimes opinions need updates.

entropea3• 5 years ago

Arch is not something for people that want to just use their devices. It's something for people who love to tinker.

I've been running Arch (Endeavor w/KDE now) as a desktop for probably 7 years and I just use my device. I get updates that break small things in KDE, or give me major screen tearing in Firefox once in awhile, but nothing that "breaks so often". It's pretty good and solid in 2021...

qudat2• 5 years ago

  - OS: Arch Linux
  - Window Manager: Sway
  - Backups: rsync.net
  - Mail: migadu.com
  - Coding sr.ht
  - Private servers: kimsufi.com
  - Music: bandcamp.com
  - Headphones: Grado SR325 X
  - Camera: Fujuifilm X-T4

Ah the drew devault starter kit

dotancohen3• 5 years ago

That is a great list. And a reminder to backup.

alberth• 5 years ago

For mail, I would really consider Fastmail (over Migadu).

Fastmail has contributed a huge amount to the open source community, also include Calendar support (Migadu does not) and has a fantastic web interface (where Migadu is extremely lacking).

worble2• 5 years ago

Even though I have no expectation that my emails are 100% private, I'm still incredibly hesitent to trust any company operating out of Australia with their horrible stance towards encryption and backdoors (which is not Fastmails fault of course, it's a pretty horrible situation for them).

I'm fairly sure that Migadu also supports caldav, although I don't think there's any UI for it on the web. I think there's pretty much an expectation that most people using Migadu are bringing their own clients rather than using the web one anyways.

post_break2• 5 years ago

Fastmail is in australia though? Didn't they just get completely backdoored?

npteljes2• 5 years ago

Posteo is also good. Endorsed by the FSF even. Not sure about the web interface hehe, it's just RoundCube.

qudat2• 5 years ago

Yeah that's what I use for email and I've had no issues with it.

falcolas3• 5 years ago

I wonder why there's always such a focus on streaming music, and not the old fashioned "play what you own". You're just putting yourself at the mercy of a slightly different service provider.

basisword4• 5 years ago

Bandamp allows you to purchase music directly from the artist, in high quality, and download and own it permanently. They also let you stream it from them after purchasing it which is a useful bonus but the main thing is you own the music.

wintermutestwin• 5 years ago

As someone with 60+ gigs of mp3s all organized into folders and properly tagged, I'll take Apple Music all day long. What "mercy" am I subjecting myself to? A friend says: check out this band, and within seconds I am playing it. Compared to spending a huge % of my income on records and CDs and then a huge % of my time dealing with mp3s, this is living the dream! How am I being abused? Because I don't own the music I am renting? My annual sub would buy a paltry number of CDs.

ajsharp9• 5 years ago

One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers. Good quality hardware married with a great OS / window manager. Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps, a thin layer of native code to run a bunch of javascript. The main notable exception is XCode, but the ecosystem of non-ios/apple developers is far larger. Wish someone would do this. I'd pre-order tomorrow.

rapsey5• 5 years ago

Insurpassable barrier to entry. Not a chance.

Jyaif3• 5 years ago

What are you talking about? Any large tech company could pull that off. The problem is those large companies are not interested in catering to a million developers, they are interested in catering to a billion people.

ajsharp9• 5 years ago

What about the barrier to entry is insurpassable? Apple hardware in about a decade went from being something every developer I know raved about and loved to being something everyone complains about and is generally unhappy about. Apple went from being a computer company to a consumer electronics company. The more they expand into other consumer verticals (tablets, headphones, CARS), the more the computer products suffer.

dotancohen3• 5 years ago

Put Kubuntu on any modern Dell desktop or Thinkpad laptop. In 95% of the cases enjoy total hardware compatibility right out of the box, and a UI that will pass for "The next Windows" for most people whose needs do not exceed browsing the internet and Facebook properties.

If they need a photo manager, in my experience the most common application need after a web browser, then Digikam really cannot be beat.

nobleach4• 5 years ago

While hardware may work, there are so many niceties people will have to learn to deal with. Plugging in an external monitor may or may not work. Audio may or may not switch like folks are used to. (Try telling someone to launch alsa mixer) Want to use bluetooth? It might work. If it doesn't, you're going to be messing with things deeper than a "Facebook/Internet user" wants to deal with.

I am a full time Linux user. And I'll probably support anyone who wants to try it until the day I die. I absolutely love it. But we still can't enjoy some of the simplest use cases without screwing around with configs and in some cases, writing scripts that listen to DBus or udev.... So every time I hear someone say, "just use Linux" I think... nah, just buy a Chromebook (and - yeah, use Linux). If your needs are any more than that, Linux might not be for you.

raoa• 5 years ago

I'm on a Dell XPS 13 with Ubuntu right now. People some times give examples of things like external monitors not working for them on Linux.

Here is one. Randomly, based on no relevant input from me or changes in the laptop's state, my network connection dropped and the Network Manager UI was telling me no network adaptor could be detected.

Some fumbling around in the Terminal (including various reboots not solving the issue), and managed to enable the wireless adaptor which apparently could be detected and connect to my network, though at the same time the UI was telling me in no uncertain terms that no wireless adaptor was connected to my laptop.

Then later, again randomly, based on no relevant input from me or changes in the laptop's state, the UI agrees there is a wireless adaptor connected after all. This is on a machine currently in near-factory state with certified compatible Ubuntu preinstalled.

I share this example because one can at least comprehend why random monitors or graphics cards or what not do not cooperate without fiddling, can comprehend certain apps failing and crashing, can comprehend other unusual bugs. The UI thinking and acting like there is not a network card for no reason whatsoever, on the other hand, is completely illegible to even competent users.

Someone needs to just commercialise a proprietary and at least initially closed version of Linux (so as to to turn a profit) with good design principles in mind and deal with lawsuits and license issues later. There is plenty of money in it.

burlesona2• 5 years ago

Software ecosystems have a major chicken and egg problem.

If you wanted to create a new platform, your best option would be to go the other way and make an OS that was “just electron” and ran all the electron apps in the world faster and better than anything else. Unsurprisingly Google has tried this with Chromebooks, but their track record on consumer product development is so poor that perhaps they just didn’t execute well and someone else could pull it off.

Another challenge is that if you did that you gain wide software compatibility but you lose any obvious differentiator. The likely way to win would be if you could make a laptop that was “just as good at running web apps as your Mac, with just as much battery life and just as nice hardware” but somehow cost under $400 or so.

I actually wouldn’t be surprised if we see that coming out of Chinese OEMs in the next decade.

MonaroVXR2• 5 years ago

but somehow cost under $400 or so.

Screens are the most expensive things on a laptop, mobile and tablet.

So you are not going to get a good screen

Closi2• 5 years ago

If by "biggest opportunity" you mean "biggest opportunity to lose all your money and chase a pipe-dream" then I agree :)

'Next/Apple' isn't a quick playbook - it's an over 30 year R&D effort to create a hugely complex software and hardware business, and it spent about $100 billion in R&D to get its products where they are today (at the absolute cutting edge of technology). Writing your own modern OS and building/manufacturing good hardware to compete with this is difficult enough, and then you have the even bigger challenge of getting all the major software vendors to support your new platform.

ajsharp9• 5 years ago

Didn't say it would be quick. Sure, it was a long cycle for them, but the ecosystem is much further along now. I think it's to bring to market in the hundreds of millions.

rsync4• 5 years ago

"'Next/Apple' isn't a quick playbook - it's an over 30 year R&D effort to create a hugely complex software and hardware business, and it spent about $100 billion in R&D to get its products where they are today ..."

But isn't this much, much easier if you just piggyback on the Apple hardware ?

I always expected this to happen.

Circa 2008 or 2009 I thought that any day now there would be a linux distribution built specifically foe one single Apple laptop. No hardware issues, no gremlins, no moving targets - you would have a (very) fixed hardware target and optimize just for that. Then I, as a user, could just go to the Apple store and buy a nice shiny device and install MBAlinux on it and call it a day.

I really don't understand why this never happened. Further, in many ways it seems that the opposite of this happened - installing linux/FreeBSD is weirdly painful on Apple laptops which is unexpected since we all know what is inside of them and the installed base is huge.

So I would suggest that you could, indeed, build a hardware/software ecosystem - just let Apple build the hardware part ...

runako3• 5 years ago

focused on developers

The problem with this is which developers? People who write embedded systems? Web developers? People who write custom Windows applications?

Any given developer subset is likely to find this hypothetical new developer computer to be either too complex to use or not differentiated enough from Windows or MacOs (or ChromeOS).

Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps

This is not true for most people whose primary employment is writing software, or working on software teams. Most people who get paid to write code work primarily in either the Java or .NET ecosystems and use something like Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Visual Studio. (Many more are using niche-specific tools in a captive platform like Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, etc.) If the new platform doesn't have 100.0% binary compatibility with legacy tools written for Windows and/or MacOS, its addressable market shrinks substantially.

ajsharp9• 5 years ago

Agree to disagree. Java is inherently cross platform. Jetbrains stuff runs on any linux platform, as does vscode and any of the modern development workflow stuff. The development stack is steadily moving away from native apps. Vscode is essentially a webapp, and indeed it can run be run as one.

kitsunesoba• 5 years ago

I would also argue that focusing on developers too much is actually a loss for users. Developer productivity above all is how we've ended up with resource hogs like Chrome and Electron as well as never-ending erosion of customizability in software as well as the user's level of control and privacy.

It's critical to have a great developer story yes, but to make a stellar platform that needs to be balanced with a great user story, and that means developers might not always get everything they want down to the letter.

coldtea7• 5 years ago

One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers.

Why would that be an opportunity though?

It would be a low margin niche, with a small market segment, of which most would stick with Apple/Lenovo/Dell.

ajsharp9• 5 years ago

Software developers are a large and massively growing market segment. That's not niche.

linguae• 5 years ago

Have you looked into Purism (https://puri.sm)? Purism makes its own hardware such as the Librem line of smartphones and laptops, and maintains its own Linux distribution called PureOS. Purism also funds the development of apps (https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/).

ajsharp9• 5 years ago

Had not seen this. Thanks for sharing.

elliekelly• 5 years ago

The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS, a fully free, ethical and open-source operating system that is not based on Android or iOS.

And physical hardware kill switches? This almost seems too good to be true.

jrsj2• 5 years ago

Fuchsia is really the only new OS under development that I’m aware of. And it’s not even clear if Google intends to ship it outside of niche embedded use cases like Nest products etc

sneak2• 5 years ago

Developers unhappy with Windows, Mac, and Linux is not a very big market.

Most developers I know are happy with their mac or windows spyware, or their rough edges linux rig.

ur-whale• 5 years ago

Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps, a thin layer of native code to run a bunch of javascript.

I'd be interested to know what "we" means in this sentence.

Do you mean your team?

Or developers in general?

If the latter, I am not sure what industry you work in, but I very much doubt the majority of developers operate in the environment you describe.

dev_tty01• 5 years ago

One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers.

If it was focused on developers, it would by definition not be re-running the Apple playbook. Developers are much too small a market to justify that level of investment.

a-dub• 5 years ago

i think a lot about this, these days, to be honest. re-run the next/apple playbook? no. build an integrated hardware and software company that fixes personal computing through ground up rebuilds of everything from processors to operating systems and programming languages to solve the annoyances of security, privacy, software bloat and the generally humdrum nature of new technologies being shipped these days?

maybe.

it would be amazing to build systems that are are so beautiful that they inspire people like berners-lee and carmack to do their things.

Terretta4• 5 years ago

I'm confused. From his success list:

I basically went back 5 or 10 years and replaced every "modern" technology solution. I pay now way more than I did with iCloud, but I am back in control. I am more productive.

- Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality

- I can take real photos wiht high quality instead of relying on ever newer iPhone models for thousands of dollars which will always have lesser quality than a mirrorless camera for the same price

- I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists

- Coding via neovim on a terminal and just being on my keyboard navigating not only tmux and co, but also my OS is way more productive and faster

Which of these can I not do on a Mac?

recvonline• 5 years ago

I think it's a "philosophical standpoint"

I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.

Terretta4• 5 years ago

Many of us probably know senior folks at Apple.

While this is purely anecdotal, I've observed a higher proportion of "mission oriented" product and even I.T. leads at Apple than at the other brands he adopted in this divorce. (He's not using Framework laptop yet.)

shapefrog8• 5 years ago

Shout out to the unambitous product manager / owner who doesnt want a raise at Fujifilm for making such nice cameras. There is no chance that they tweaked the XT-2 or XT-3 to compete with the also excelent Sony products in order to impress the guys back at HQ.

Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN.

defaultname2• 5 years ago

The post can be distilled down to "I had a Mac and thought it made me special, but now I don't feel special so I use something else and think that makes me special".

Which...I guess? Millions (billions) of people use all sorts of stuff. Good for them.

The "I'm leaving [some platform]" posts are always extremely low value pablum for a subset.

foobarian• 5 years ago

It reminds me of the early MUDs and some MMO guild bulletin boards where you'd periodically get these super melodramatic "I quit and this is why" posts, which would more often than not be followed by the person returning to the game not long after.

hef198985• 5 years ago

As somoeone who did the same thing recently, just to MS and Google (I still have a hard time abandoning YoutUbe and Youtube Music along with my years-long build playlist and preferences), I can relate. Because what the OP described is basically the recognition that

- dedicated hardware does a better job than general purpose one (cameras vs. smartphones)

- the smartphone ecosystem (regardless of brand) is becoming more closed, and monitored, every year

- there are enough alternatives out there, even if those mean to give up some "conveniences" we thought we won over the last years (IMHO, most of the perceived "inconveniences" that come from these alternatives are more due to lock-in and dark-patterns from FANG/MS and phone OEMs)

tshaddox2• 5 years ago

Some people don't care about their computers making them feeling special and instead just have a set of goals and choose the computer hardware and software which best accomplishes those goals.

65• 5 years ago

Yeah, this is just the nerd equivalent of being a hipster. It's not even as though any of the changes are any better, they're just different. Which of course means you can then write a blog post in a cool monospace font with your cool domain name proclaiming your nerd coolness to the masses.

mholm• 5 years ago

The measurement of success in this case doesn't seem to be that he's gained new abilities, but rather the poster figured out how to gain them without Apple.

Most of these seem like pyrric victories to me, as the Apple versions rose to success with all of these as competition by providing a better experience. I certainly wouldn't want to carry a mirrorless camera everywhere, nor deal with Bandcamp.

hef198985• 5 years ago

Depends on the mirrorless camera, doesn't it? The smaller ones are hardly bigger than larger smartphone, and they do offer way better picture quality.

indymike4• 5 years ago

the Apple versions rose to success with all of these as competition by providing a better experience

At one time, Apple clearly was a better experience.

Now, with features removed and new "privacy and security" features added, I'm not sure they are a great experience. For example, my Macbook reminds me of Windows Vista, except for worse, every time there's a system update and I have to reboot to permission the camera for a web conference.

I've learned to dread OSX updates because instead of adding new useful stuff, it seems like we just move things around, change out the icons and add some more intrusive "touch the fingerprint reader" authentications... plus I have to re-permission half of the apps and hardware just to do my job. Then there's the whole reboot, unlock, install, reboot, re-lock cycle. It's seriously worse than Windows Vista. Anyone remember the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials?

tarsinge• 5 years ago

For Bandcamp maybe regarding playing and library, but not regarding discovery.

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

I have to travel a ways to specialty shops to buy reasonably good headphones with wires. It makes me mad every time I need to buy some new headphones for my computer.

cultofmetatron• 5 years ago

I carried a google pixel 3 which took excellent pictures.

That said, I now carry a mirrorless camera everywhere. The pictures are WAY higher quality and I have more control over the experience and the final output. Don't get a mirrorless if thats not important to you.

when I want to just take a quick selfie, I still have my phone. The iPhone is great at taking pictures but its never going to be a match for a mirrorless wihch has a enormous sized sensor compared to anything you'll get on a phone.

eikenberry2• 5 years ago

nor deal with Bandcamp.

Curious what's wrong with dealing with Bandcamp? They seem just about the best place to buy music online. Majority of the money goes to the actual artist and you have a good choice of formats.

heavyset_go2• 5 years ago

I certainly wouldn't want to carry a mirrorless camera everywhere, nor deal with Bandcamp.

Bandcamp recommendations and artist/album similarity ratings are top notch, and there are many clients for the platform.

I personally can't use Spotify or Apple Music after taking advantage of Bandcamp.

Bandcamp also only takes a 10% - 15% fee for digital purchases, and 10% of purchases for physical items, which is an incredible deal for artists compared to what they make from streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify.

jay_kyburz7• 5 years ago

Bandcamp is great, and there is something really wrong with Apple music in Firefox on windows. Its very slow and its seems to do authentication _after_ loading the rest of the page and often fails.

onion2k• 5 years ago

Which of these can I not do on a Mac?

You can do all of them when you use a Mac, but Apple will do a lot to try to persuade you not to. That means you'll spend a lot of mental energy fighting with Apple's very effective p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ marketing department, and often you won't win. That's fine. You don't really lose anything, but every so often you'll think to yourself "I listen to the same bands all the time" or "I wish this phone had a bigger camera sensor." and you'll regret putting so much of your life, and money, in Apple's pockets.

halo372534• 5 years ago

Honestly this is by far the biggest problem I currently have with newer versions of MacOSX.

I would have hopped by now that integration with dropbox, Sharepoint/Onedrive, Google Drive would have gotten better. But they are mostly barebones.

Granted Google Drive is barebones on nearly every platform.

I'm a big 365 user, and that is by far the best experience so far in terms of fluid use between devices and apps. Especially on windows, where even sharing a file doesn't require a Web browser popup. But oh man the admin side of 365 is overly complex, and easy to see why people use gsuite.

iCloud Sucks and has always sucked. Unless that is you are 100% apple ecosystem. Integration into my onsite server is easy with 365, google, and dropbox. Icloud is super clunky and really thinking about moving the Wife to something other than iCloud.

halo372534• 5 years ago

Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux. Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise. Hell the window's drivers are bad enough, Apple doesn't really want users doing anything other than OSX.

I will say they have no problem booting up a VM, and everything he is doing can be done in a VM with hardware accelerated graphics. So Full screened feels just like the real thing, as long as you are not playing modern games. Boot into windows for that.

That being said there are Windows Laptops that will give a Macbook Pro a run for the money, but when it comes to the $1k price range the Macbook Air is hard to beat. I like the ARM chips for basic users, but for a Power user the ARM chips are a step backwards. Unless you want to run ARM based Linux. With my many years of raspberry pi use, ARM has gone a long way on the Linux front. But not sure if i'd want to rock that as my main.

At the same time you can do all these things on Windows as well.... Really more of a personal preference. I have limited experience with Linux for Windows Subsystem 2, but it worked damn well when I used it.

shapefrog8• 5 years ago

Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux.

Dual booting on any hardware is nuts if you ask me, pick an OS and use VMs. If you really have to have a native OS but hate it so much you wont use it the rest of the time stick it on a different machine.

hirvi74• 5 years ago

I hope things have gotten better with Linux and drivers. I'll admit I've been out of the game for about 5 years now.

Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise.

When I was using Linux as my main OS, I was having this problem with all laptops. Desktops usually had many less issues, but were occasionally less than perfect.

For example, Lenovo, at the time, was hailed to be great for Linux compatibility. Well, for some reason, regardless of the distro I was using, I was more or less given an ultimatum -- I could have a screen with adjustable brightness or a consistent network card driver, but not both. Editing whatever file I found on various forms to "fix" the backlight issue (was permanently stuck at 100% brightness) would inevitably cause some sort issue with where my Internet connection speed would drop from around 1gbps to mbps eventually to kbps the longer laptop was awake.

It was an issue I never found a solution to, and the oddest part was that this was never an issue if I booted the OS of a live USB. Only when the OS was installed would the issue arise.

Various laptops I owned / used for work had their own issues with Linux too. I eventually just settled on using Linux in virtual machines / servers and never looked back. So, I definitely agree with your point about VMs.

I'd consider going back, but I really cannot/do not want want to sacrifice too much time getting distracted with making the OS bend to my will when I could use that time to be actually getting things done.

nobleach4• 5 years ago

On a mac, with say, 4 workspaces. What key combo can I hit to go to workspace 2?

Yes you can hit CTRL + left arrow or right arrow multiple times but... once one gets into a workflow that allows them to hit Super+2, it actually feels like a pain to do something else.

rootusrootus2• 5 years ago

Control-2 if you enable it. Or 1, 3, or 4.

rsync4• 5 years ago

"Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ..."

This item is the reason I am leaving the iphone and trying an unlocked/stock android device.

My music collection is a directory tree that I have curated and organized since 1996.

The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app.

Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane.

It is a workflow built for people that impulse buy a track here and there ...

Terretta4• 5 years ago

The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app. Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

On the contrary, any number of apps support precisely this.

- https://readdle.com/documents (not just music)

- https://www.everappz.com/evermusic

- https://brushedtype.co/doppler/

- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sony-music-center/id724406878 (if you use Sony headphones)

- http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html

- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mrmc-touch/id1062986407

There's no point in listing all of them.

Having ripped some 20,000 CD tracks a couple decades ago, I use several such apps.

As a user of such apps, I'd argue with "correct" though, given Apple Match with iCloud One combo and last year's update supporting high resolution / lossless.

Over time, I have come to use those apps less than Apple Match, which mirrors my rips using tracks from Apple's library where they have them, or uploads mine where they don't, giving me more seamless access across all devices, spoken access from Siri on HomePods, etc. Match was a debacle at launch, is now almost never wrong on even the most obscure tracks.

vladvasiliu3• 5 years ago

Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane.

This is not completely true. You can store your iTunes collection wherever you like, organized however you like. You don't have to duplicate anything, although it's true that the default is for it to "import" it.

You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice.

I used to have this setup with my music collection on Google Drive (because it didn't fit on my MBP's internal drive) and synced some of it to my iPhone. It worked well enough. The issue was more that all the music couldn't fit on the phone, so I had to pick and choose anyway.

The real gotcha is that iTunes didn't support flac, so I had to convert everything to m4a.

pixelgeek4• 5 years ago

Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

It is so bad that it makes me wonder who at Apple thought any of it was a good idea. Its not even 'bad from a certain perspective' bad but totally FUBAR.

I simply stopped trying to use my phone for playing music and it is the #1 reason why my partner wants to move away from iOS

nicce• 5 years ago

Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

No, it is not impossible. It is very easy at least as Linux user.

There is a project for that, called as iFuse https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse

It basically allows you to mount the Media chroot filesystem and the app specific sandboxed filesystems without a jailbreak.

zimpenfish2• 5 years ago

Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

I believe VOX Music Player allows you to upload your music without using iTunes - although it is using their cloud sync instead. Flacbox also seems to let you download and play local files from Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, SMB servers, DLNA servers, ...

It doesn't seem "totally impossible"?

EricE• 5 years ago

Using a file system as a metadata storage system is pretty dumb - especially when music files have ID3 tags built into their formats. There are tools that will help you fill out the metadata in the tags based on your file system layout. Once you do that you can use the tags to slice/dice. Smart Playlists are very powerful.

Or you can use one of the many other apps others linked to if you really want to stick to the whole filesystem thing.

I quickly got away from trying to organize stuff in the file system when I got my Personal Jukebox 100 (PJB100) - literally the first hard drive based MP3 player out there in the mid 90's. It heavily relied on MP3 tags so I developed tag discipline early on - and never looked back. Tags are WAY more flexible than folder structures. I couldn't care less how files are stored in the file system.

This conversation always amuses me - we don't complain the computer tracks all the parts of our files in a directory while we have no control over the layout of the files on disk - mainly because that's a level of minutiae better left to automation. For me it's a similar things with my music files. As long as my tag information is accurate (and since it's the first thing I do when I add something to my collection, it is) I can manage my music collection however I want irrespective of where the file is.

jxdxbx• 5 years ago

I think that manually organizing your own files is not really compatible with a large music library (I have around 2 TB of music) and, from my experience, was too much of a barrier for most people anyway. I currently use Swinsian to organize files (and various metadata-fixing tools) and Plex + Plexamp to listen to them. Mac mini server, iPhone. Works great. This is just to say that one person's "correct" is another person's cumbersome and unintuitive.

handrous• 5 years ago

Uh, did something change? As recently as a year ago I just dragged files into iTunes (or Music or whatever they call it now, but this was definitely after the split) then selected which artists I wanted to sync, and I only had to do that step because I didn't want them all on there. I didn't have to do anything with playlists.

But then, my metadata's in pretty good shape, so it barely even matters how my music files are stored. One big flat directory, carefully named folders, not that important.

To be fair, I guess I did have to convert the Flac to m4a. Drag to converter program, convert a ton in one go, drag those into iTunes. So that's one more step.

minimaul• 5 years ago

The old iTunes Media Library .xml format isn't too complicated - I wrote a few small tools to generate m3u8 playlists, and another to convert .m3u8 playlists into itunes library xml. Then I just import that straight into the music app.

Shouldn't take more than an afternoon of a reasonably proficient developer's time. I agree that it's not great that you should need to do this kind of thing, but it's less effort than switching to android ;)

egypturnash3• 5 years ago

My music collection is a giant pile of files (~19k tracks, according to iTunes) that I have been curating for a similar length of time, but I let iTunes do all the grind of organizing them on disc for me. My purchasing and listening is pretty much entirely on an album basis.

iTunes uploads it to Apple's cloud, since I'm paying for iTunes Match; my iPhone and iPads pull it down. It is very easy to search for a single album on the iOS players; they also make it very easy to find your most recent acquisitions, with an automatically-populated "Recently Added" playlist.

~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music looks almost exactly like the directory structure you're probably meticulously maintaining by hand (lots of Artist Name/Album Name/01 Track Name.m4a), but adding new stuff to it is a simple matter of dropping a directory full of properly-tagged files onto iTunes. Then I delete the original files after iTunes has copied it into its directory.

It breaks down if 90% of your collection is a bunch of badly-tagged files you downloaded off of KazAa, but if your collection is a mix of stuff you ripped from CDs back in the nineties and made sure were tagged properly, and stuff you've bought that the musician/store tagged properly, it works pretty much seamlessly. Except for this one weird glitch where sometimes iTunes on my Mac decides that I have both the copy of a track I bought off of the Apple store, and one in the cloud, and thus plays every song off an album twice. I've kinda quit buying stuff from Apple because of this; I'll go to Bandcamp first.

What is the attraction of meticulously maintaining a directory structure that a computer can very, very easily maintain based on the metadata stored in the files? Why are you so married to explicitly browsing a duplicate of this filesystem on other player devices?

webmobdev• 5 years ago

I'm confused ... Which of these can I not do on a Mac?

You apparently didn't read the article properly. The author's major grouse is how he recognized slowly that Apple is very controlling about the user experience on its devices and how this is a huge limitation to do anything else "outside" of Apple's "thinking" of how a software or hardware should be used. And how Apple's product manager's have lost sight of what really adds value to the user experience, and their software and hardware choices of new Apple devices are now more dictated by their own greed / ambitions.

From the very examples you cited, the author's emphasis thus was on:

... but I am back in control. I am more productive.
Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ...
I can take real photos wiht high quality ...
I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists
... but also my OS is way more productive and faster

So it's not just about what you can or cannot do on a Mac, but how the author has found a better way to do all this outside of Apple's limiting ecosystem, keeping in line with his new beliefs that Apple no longer cares about users like him. And I fully agree with him and share the exact feeling (I feel Apple says a "F*k you" to me everytime I want to maximise a Finder or Safari window because the "Apple way" is that you are only supposed to make them fullscreen or vertically maximise ...)

NoPicklez3• 5 years ago

The third dot point here makes absolutely no sense to me.

Apple music and Bandcamp are essentially the same thing, I personally use Spotify and I don't have to listen to "mind numbing" music. You can choose to let the applications play music for you, or you can choose your own music.

Spotify 10 years ago was exactly how I discovered old/new bands and artists that were not mainstream.

I don't see this persons logic in that regard at all.

hammyhavoc3• 5 years ago

The author is stating that not all music sees distribution on Spotify et al, instead it is distributed via Bandcamp or other sources. A lot of older material isn't available through Spotify et al due to licensing issues, or labels that have gone bust.

diffeomorphism3• 5 years ago

Sure, you could get a mac and then opt out of/remove all things apple, but then why get a mac in the first place?

I don't think that is confusing at all, just a matter of degree between leaving all services of apple or additionally leaving their OS as well.

8fingerlouie2• 5 years ago

Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality

"Hey Siri, shuffle <playlist name>" - no clicks involved.

As for wired/wireless headphones. I wasn't aware that running Arch was a requirement for using Wired headphones, but then again, i moved to wireless headphones a decade or so ago, and have changed my habits to allow me to charge them while i sleep, as well as checking the product specifications for any headphones i buy to see if they actually match my expected usage pattern. But then again, i'm weird.

yunohn2• 5 years ago

I can take real photos with high quality instead of relying on ever newer iPhone models

The author could’ve done this even within the Apple ecosystem. The vast majority of photographers use iPhones too, but manage their DSLR/mirrorless photos with iPhoto too.

sequoia• 5 years ago

I want to leave the apple ecosystem as well, and appreciate this post, but there’s an inherent limitation to “just switched” posts like this. To wit: they don’t capture the cost and benefit over time. Switching to Arch & rsync takes “just a month,” but then you upgrade something and drivers break, you have an issue on your remote machine you’re syncing to and have to debug it, your backups stop working and you urgently need to address the issue, etc etc. Either one of these can be showstopping issues. That said, Macs screw up on updates as well at times.

The general point is that “just switched” narratives like this paint an incomplete picture because one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it. Not so rsync.

beebeepka• 5 years ago

Comparing two opposite extremes - Arch to Apple - has its merits but it's hardly useful. Justike this blog post

I certainly didn't have to sacrifice much of anything by moving from Windows 8 (the best one) to Ubuntu and Manjaro.

I've even moved old people to Ubuntu back in the gnome 2 days. Worked great

dotancohen3• 5 years ago

With Arch you might get breakages. If you're worried about that, then go with Kubuntu. Seriously, it has been ages since I've seen hardware compatibility issues with Kubuntu, maybe eight years or longer across literally dozens of install on my own and other peoples' hardware.

SamuelAdams• 5 years ago

I’ve been running Debian on a laptop using rsync to back up my files. This has been my setup for at least three years. Not sure why OP thinks it breaks all that often.

christophilus• 5 years ago

I've been running Fedora for the better part of a year. The switching costs for me were negligible. What I like about Fedora is that it is really stable while still being pretty bleeding edge. Vanilla Fedora (running unmodified Gnome) is really an excellent OS. So far, I haven't had any major issues.

The biggest thing I missed was the Macbook trackpad. The Dell XPS's trackpad is janky by comparison.

That said, I won't be confident in recommending this setup until I've been through another year or so of upgrade cycles.

freetime22• 5 years ago

one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it

Just to offer up a real-world counter-example, I once ran into a syncing issue with iCloud Photos where my family members stopped receiving any new photos that I posted to a shared album. I tried a few different things to get it to sync properly again, like logging out and back into icloud on my device, etc. It was basically impossible to debug because the whole syncing process is completely opaque to the user in Apple Photos. After about a month I was very nearly on the verge of ditching iCloud for photo sharing completely, and then one day it started working again just as mysteriously as it stopped.

I agree with your broader point that iCloud generally requires less effort to set up and manage than rsync. But in this particular case I would have really loved to be running rsync, because I could have easily debugged it.

canjobear• 5 years ago

Around 10 years ago, during my studies, almost all of my CS colleagues had Windows laptops. A few installed Linux on it, but literally no one had a MacBook.

I recall CS grad school 10 years ago as being a sea of Macbooks…

Jyaif3• 5 years ago

It depends on where you studied. In my CS class 11 years ago in France, MacBooks represented approximately 2% of the population.

mzkply• 5 years ago

California, a sea of Macs, all people switching from laptops running Linux

yoz-y• 5 years ago

When I studied CS 15-11 years ago in France, nobody had laptops in class. All practical work was done in a computer lab. I still find it weird to see a picture of a lecture hall and a sea of computers. What do people do with them?

This aside, in the dorm Macs were maybe 10-20% with a healthy amount of mac hating.

arnon• 5 years ago

Regional differences.

This is not true in Europe and Asia.

halo372534• 5 years ago

The iOS ecosystem has always been crap. I love the device and how the UI keeps becoming more android like, but iCloud stinks. Google by far as a better cloud platform for a standard user. But for a business Sharepoint/Onedrive has always been the way to go.

I personally never had a problem with Macbooks, and surprised he just didn't work in a VM. I do 90% of my daily work in a VM on my Macbook, either running Arch or Debian. Everything just works. But I can not stand with apple's choice of moving to ARM for a power user.

My Next Machine will run windows as the base OS. I'll test out their Linux for Windows Subsystem, but most likely just boot up the same VMware VM's i've been using for a long time. Between Snapshots and backups to both my onsite server and my Personal Sharepoint, I never have an issue.

Spotify for music though, it just works and easy to push music around my home.

zepto• 5 years ago

but iCloud stinks. Google by far as a better cloud platform for a standard user.

In what way?

dmitriid3• 5 years ago

I can attest this for photos.

Google Photos is a third-party app, and it syncs photos a few magnitudes faster than Apple Photos.

I never know in which state Apple Photos are at any given moment: is it syncing? is it stuck? why?

arc-in-space3• 5 years ago

the UI keeps becoming more android like

Okay, I'll bite, because that's amusing(I find that interacting with anything Android is consistently a torture) and I don't use Apple devices so I have no idea what you could be thinking of. How is iOS stuff becoming more like Android, and how is it better than whatever it did before?

halo372534• 5 years ago

Android is more desktop like than any other Mobile OS, that goes for Windows and MacOSX.

Android simply does most thing UI better. The pull down menu and notifications, the app drawer, the home screens, the settings menu layouts, etc. Sure there are some iOS UI elements that are done better, such as gestures. But really iOS shines more under the hood.

Every year iOS keeps getting more and more Android features. App Library, Pull Down menus, more customizable home screens with widgets. There are so many things Android was doing years before iOS it is crazy. Maybe oneday Apple will fix the crappy settings menu and finally make the pulldown window a full copy of android with quick settings at the top.

Using iOS is consistently more of a Torture to use than Android any day of the week.

djhworld• 5 years ago

I'm half into the ecosystem, I don't own an iPhone but I've had various MacBooks over the years.

Latest one is the M1 air and it's almost perfect. It never gets hot, it never gets noisy, performance is superb, battery life amazing.

Really hoping a similar ARM based linux machine comes out that can beat it, but for the time being I'd find it difficult to switch away from my Air!

officeplant2• 5 years ago

Same except I got an M1 Mini. For all my hate of what apple does, I'm an ARM addict and I really love the new Mini. I really hope we eventually get full Linux support for Apple Silicon at some point just so I can play with it that way as well.

I was looking forward to Qualcomm's ARM Dev kit for Windows, but it hasn't released yet outside of what seems to be some listings on chinese websites for bulk orders of 100+ units.

It really sucks that my Pinebook Pro is still the best I can get as far as ARM linux laptops go that are easy to use and try different distros on.

ungamedplayer• 5 years ago

What are your thoughts on the pinebook. I'm trying to decide if I get a pinebook or a framework next.

dmitriid3• 5 years ago

Really hoping a similar ARM based linux machine comes out that can beat it

For that someone should've been outputting consumer devices for 12-15 years.

emptyparadise2• 5 years ago

I always look at blog posts like this and I always end up a bit disappointed when people go completely in the other direction with i3 and the like. What if I want customization and pretty animations with sane defaults? Surely there has to be some middle ground between "here's your empty screen and a keyboard shortcut to open the terminal, good luck" and "this minor release will redesign the entire interface and break all your custom themes and scripts, good luck" when it comes to open source desktops?

Still, I'm glad people are getting out of closed ecosystems.

jcfrei• 5 years ago

I'm currently in the process of moving from Linux back to Windows running VMWare. For software development, I use a virtual xubuntu distribution. For browsing the web, listening to music, etc. it's all Windows. I just can't be bothered to fix broken drivers or wonky settings on Linux for stuff that should work out of the box. At the same time I still don't see an alternative for Linux as a development environment - so I hope with this new setup I get the best of both worlds.

emptyparadise2• 5 years ago

I've actually had good luck with Linux when it comes to drivers, but I just can't pull off a good desktop setup.

Looking at those rock-solid Debian servers just wishing I could have the desktop experience of a 15 year old PowerBook to go with them...

genghizkhan• 5 years ago

Why not try out WSL? I'm not a dev myself, but for the bit of coding and scripting I do from time to time WSL is pretty good.

ByteJockey• 5 years ago

It sounds like you want XFCE.

It's the boring option, but there's a lot of customization options and they've never broken anything I use.

xioxox• 5 years ago

KDE works pretty well for me. The defaults are not bad, but it has lots of customization options. I mostly leave it on defaults, except for switching on focus follows mouse. You don't need to manually edit config files. It also has some nice (optional) animations. It's like a nicer Windows, with more customization and a more uniform UI (no mixture of historical UI elements).

neilalexander2• 5 years ago

Good grief, I wish I could agree. My experiences with KDE have been utterly horrible. Display scaling is flawed, the login screen keeps overlaying itself with a giant touch keyboard (I don't even have a touch device), my trash folder seems to end up read-only with alarming regularity, the application menu is twitchy and buggy, Konsole doesn't respect settings like unlimited scrollback properly, the System Settings is horribly laid out and crashes often (particularly when making network changes) and the people who designed KDE clearly have no concept whatsoever of whitespace (some menus are incredibly dense, other things like the application menu are huge with lots of wasted space). It feels like it was designed by programmers who know nothing about user experience.

The Pantheon desktop from elementary, on the other hand, is far closer to "sane defaults" in my mind and seems to be much less buggy.

npteljes2• 5 years ago

customization and pretty animations with sane defaults

I got my fix of this with KDE, namely with Kubuntu 20.04.

artfulhippo• 5 years ago

I love macOS and Linux. Even Windows is acceptable, especially now with WSL. IMO, if it runs emacs, who cares what the OS is?

When it comes to hardware, Apple is a few years ahead, however. Battery life and screen technology are quality-of-life factors, especially for people who often work away from home and without an external monitor.

That, and the accessories. Going from AirPods Pro to wired headphones would be a major inconvenience as I have an active lifestyle -- even my linux box supports bluetooth headphones, and it's nice to be able to get up from the computer without taking them off.

coldtea7• 5 years ago

would be a major inconvenience as I have an active lifestyle

Give it a decade or so...

hef198985• 5 years ago

One of my biggest issues with modern day phone sis the lack of a 3.5 mm headphone jack. Wired headphones mean total device compatibility (true plug and play), no battery issues and less risk of loosing them somewhere. Also, they are cheaper at comparable audio quality (and that is all I care about with headphones).

abawany2• 5 years ago

They seem to be making a comeback, at least on the mid-range: the Pixel 3a/4a/5a I think had headphone jacks as does the Gigaset GS4.

dreamcompiler• 5 years ago

There's no reason a computer or phone can't have both Bluetooth and a headphone jack. Mine do, and I use both.

nobleach4• 5 years ago

I toy with the idea every once in awhile. I own a M1 Mac and I actually hate it for various reasons. I've been a mac fanboi (I'm probably an even bigger Linux fanboi) for many years as I feel like I gave me so many of the things I love about Linux/BSD... and it's flat out beautiful. But as many have stated. Over the years, it's ceased to match my workflow. I've always kept plenty of Linux machines around me, so for the past few years, I've been full time on Linux. I do miss getting my text messages on my laptop. I do miss transferring music with ease - but I have to be honest. Using iTunes/Music to transfer music to my iPhone has actually been pretty painful the past few years. When I try to drag and drop, for some odd reason, it just says, "nope".

My issue is, the alternatives are just not as high quality. I looked at ditching my iPhone 12 for a Pixel 4 or a Samsung, and maybe getting the Samsung watch (which I hear can do blood pressure now?). But I've read so many bad reviews. Sadly, one of the biggest things that keeps me on Apple right now is iMessage. We have plenty of Apple products in the household, so I'd never ditch them totally.

jclardy2• 5 years ago

iMessage is the ultimate lock-in. Both sides of my family use iMessage, so anyone switching off iPhone becomes the black sheep by splitting off the family thread. And it sucks because it is wholly a political decision by Apple not to add android support.

But besides that, I bought a Pixel 5a for testing of android apps. While the experience is majorly improved over my last android experience...it just feels wrong. Animations are not consistent across apps. Swipe actions sometimes follow your finger, sometimes they don't. I thought widgets would be better...but wow are they ugly out of the box. Yes I am aware you can customize everything, but I really don't want to spend hours figuring all that out when I can just have sane defaults. I feel like looking at screenshots you can say that android and iOS are very similar, but that leaves out the most important part of a touch only device - the interactions with content on screen.

shapefrog8• 5 years ago

becomes the black sheep by splitting off the family thread

Worth having a shitter phone just to have the feature of not being on the family thread.

nobleach4• 5 years ago

I used to work in mobile web development. Playing with Android devices always felt sub-par. Not to mention, having to support Samsung's web browser was just terrible. I realize Samsung has gone to great lengths to try and make a beautiful experience. And truly, the whole fold-able (while not really my thing) is an advance in an interesting direction.

I did use an Android phone around 2010 (Nexus One) and it was "just okay". This was pre-iMessage. Now it really is annoying to have someone make the chat "go green". "So and so liked your message". I've seen people set up iMessage gateways just to get around this... but it's just not ideal.

hbn• 5 years ago

I thought widgets would be better...but wow are they ugly out of the box

Widgets were a big selling point in the earlier days of the Android vs iOS debate, but Google has really left them to rot over the years. Now that iOS has them, it seems like Google might be finally giving them attention again? At the very least, they're getting redesigns, but I don't know if I've heard anything about them addressing the more technical reasons of why they feel so outdated compared to the rest of the platform.

smoldesu3• 5 years ago

I'm probably going to pick up a PinePhone once they're back in stock, if KDE connect works with it then I might be able to finally have the PC/Pager combo I've always dreamed of...

bachmeier2• 5 years ago

I do miss getting my text messages on my laptop.

I used to send and receive text messages all the time on Linux. I use email, but it works fine.

gigatexal• 5 years ago

If you ever wanted to know if being in the Apple ecosystem is sometimes like being part of a religion, just watch at how far people will go to tell you they have left the ecosystem...

markstos• 5 years ago

Sway user here. Agree that tiling and customization have helped my productivity.

droopyEyelids• 5 years ago

If anyone is sticking with mac and wants a tiling window manager, https://ianyh.com/amethyst/ is pretty decent

philwelch• 5 years ago

I actually gave it a chance for a while, but in my experience it doesn't match up to i3, particularly on an ultrawide display. So I replaced it with VMWare Fusion running Regolith Linux.

This actually turns out to be a decent setup. My Mac handles Zoom and a handful of other things that are fickle with hardware, and my VM is where my work happens.

ocdtrekkie• 5 years ago

Seems like largely an improvement... except the choice to get an old Android phone as a replacement for the iPhone. From a security standpoint, there's really no alternative to the iPhone. I loathe the Apple "ecosystem" and stay on the fringes of it as much as possible, not really investing in any Apple-specific apps or services, but until there's someone else in the market that isn't Google, there's really no other choice.

entropea3• 5 years ago

I have never had a security issue on my Pixel and receive monthly security updates.

pixelgeek4• 5 years ago

It is odd when you agree with half an article.

I think that anything to do with music and transferring files to your iPad or iPhone is an utter mess on the Mac. The entire iTunes project was an utter mess and breaking that up and fixing it is going to take a long time.

I was also taken back by some of the new restrictions on the Application directory with Big Sur but it appears that they aren't as bad as I initially thought and mostly seem to apply to apps that the OS installs.

I think it is great that the author outgrew his machine. They started out as a new developer and now they have brought their skills up to the point that they require a new OS to allow them to maximise their potential. That is an awesome story.

Apple has had to ride a fine line between being a lifestyle device and a computer and I think that there are times when they totally mess it up and lock out things they don't need to. Other times they seem to get it right.

Like a lot of people here I really wish Apple would stop trying to organize my music but I also realise that a large number of people younger than me don't even own music any more.

The number of use cases for these devices is huge and it is natural that the hardware can't be everything to everyone. It used to be the case but so many more people use computers and use them for a wide variety of things that those days are far behind us.

bwanab• 5 years ago

I don’t think it’s just people “younger than” you who don’t own any music anymore. Statistically, I’m pretty sure I’m older and I gave away my entire CD collection (as I had previously done with my LPs). I ripped the very few that I couldn’t find on Spotify. It just doesn’t make sense for me to keep all those plastic discs around when I can carry my entire collection and anything else I want to listen to around all the time. As for quality of sound, at my age I’m happy to hear at all.

pixelgeek4• 5 years ago

I started getting rid of most of my 'things' a long time ago as well. Physical representations of most items seem pointless if I can get a digital version.

What I was trying to say is that while I might have a lot of ripped CDs and music on my devices it seems as if there is a growing number of people that just subscribe to services and forgo owning any music at all

gentle• 5 years ago

I went through this process a few years ago when Apple removed the iPhone headphone jack and I'll probably never go back.

The thing that cemented that for me recently was how Apple now insists on notarization for all applications, even command line applications. My current company uses old versions of lots of open source applications, and MacOS constantly freaks out about them.

Time to move to Linux full time.

abc_lisper• 5 years ago

The article is light on criticism about Apple. Usually what happens to these people is they go out all guns blazing, spend a lot of time, figure how to do stuff the hard way, feel temporarily in control and then face death by a thousand cuts or decreased productivity. It is the case with 90% of the users. For most people, computer is a means to an end, which Apple understands spectacularly well. It gives you 5-star hotel like experience with its products. Is everything perfect? No. Does it make mistakes? Yes. There is no progress without mistakes, unless you allow many many years for ideation. Apple strikes this balance spectacularly well, they are mostly at the forefront of tech, meanwhile giving users a fantastic experience. It is Ritz Carlton of computers, you stay there, do your business, expect mostly everything to work like a well oiled machine, and you go home without sweat after finishing your work. To write 3 or 4 subjective opinions about Apple and dismissing it tells more about the author than Apple IMO.

izacus• 5 years ago

Or you know, most people just click on the "Chrome" icon on Windows, see it looks the same as on macOS and happily carry on.

The "everything is a web/Electron app" trend has pretty much ensured that your "productivity" effect is pretty much only in your head now.

foxpurple5• 5 years ago

macOS still offers benefits. If you have an iPhone, everything is synced up for you so your reminders set on your Mac will ping you on your phone. You get the anti loss/theft features of find my, the insanely efficient M1 chip and a load of other things.

jay_kyburz7• 5 years ago

Haha, I think that's a great analogy.

I would never stay at a Ritz Carlton and pay $1000 a night when I could stay at the motel down the road for $100.

I'm not waited on hand and foot, I have to do everything myself, but its done the way I like it, and I've saved myslef $900 as well.

foxpurple5• 5 years ago

That’s fine and valid, but many people make enough money where slumming it for some small savings no longer makes sense.

dvdkon• 5 years ago

Except there have been too many mistakes and missteps for a while now, it's three stars at best. I can respect a system that does what I need it to do in one opinionated way, but when that system doesn't do what I need or does too many things poorly, why would I stay? If I need to fix the system anyway, I'll use one that makes it easiest.

bengale2• 5 years ago

This generally my take on this too. When I see posts like this I’m never sure if I’m envious of the free time to faff about like this, or have pity that they have nothing better to do.

marbletiles• 5 years ago

Apple Photos is no Aperture, but the lack of an alternative listed for Linux is glaring. What’s he managing all these RAWs he’s shooting with?

basisword4• 5 years ago

Darktable? It gets posted on HN frequently and seems like a lightroom competitor.

serverholic• 5 years ago

How come we always see articles like this about Apple and not Google? Why do nerds seem to have a hate boner against Apple but not the advertising company that is trying to invade every aspect of your private life and sell your info to the highest bidder?

The android users at my day job are extremely vocal about hating Apple, yet the people using Apple devices mostly mind their own business.

Perhaps it's an ego thing? Like maybe they can't afford Apple devices for their whole family so they buy Android and hate on Apple instead.

monkeyfacebag4• 5 years ago

I’m actually joining the Apple ecosystem from Android/Windows for similar reasons. In particular, I wanted to use Logic instead of paying huge sums for new versions of Ableton; I wanted to use Pixelmator Pro instead of paying for Adobe subscription (although Affinity Photo is also available on windows); I wanted to use Time Machine instead of Google Drive; I especially wanted my passwords stored on my computer instead of locked behind my Google account at passwords.google.com (I was locked out of my Google account for a week once and it was temporarily life-ruining); and finally, I was so tired of trying to keep up with endless UI changes in Windows and Android. I’m not saying these were good reasons, but they were my reasons. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure I guess.

tomc19859• 5 years ago

Google's ecosystem != Windows ecosystem.

There's FLStudio (or Bitwig, or Reaper) to match Apple's Logic, 1Password (or Bitlocker from what I hear) to match Google's passwords.google.com, and Backblaze+others to match Time Machine

Sure 'switching to apple' is a choice, but only one of many. Personally I am tired of using tech designed for and by managers and SWE's gunning for promotion and not personal empowerment or passion for personal computing

Besides, everyone needs to ditch Chrome. Firefox could use the love

monkeyfacebag4• 5 years ago

Of course I agree with your point that there are many options when it comes to switching. I tried, but clearly failed, to imply this very point. For me, after consideration of my requirements and tolerances, Apple seemed like the best fit, but I wouldn’t suggest that it has any kind of broader implication for the state of various software ecosystems.

Suffice to say I think all of the software in your list is pretty great and I chose what I chose for reasons that are wholly mine!

phire2• 5 years ago

There is no windows for phones (anymore). If you aren't using an apple phone, you are pretty much forced to use google's android (or one of the various linux phones with little financial backing)

Windows/Android can be considered a natural pair, Microsoft seem to think so. Personally use Linux/Android pair, and I've been vaguely considering switching to an iphone to avoid Google.

dundercoder• 5 years ago

+1 for Reaper. Fast and fantastic piece of software. I switched from ProTools and have never looked back.

runjake3• 5 years ago

+1. File History is the Time Machine equivalent for Windows. It works great.

It should be used in concert with an offsite backup service like Backblaze.

dep_b• 5 years ago

There's FLStudio (or Bitwig, or Reaper) to match Apple's Logic

Plenty arguments against Logic, but these three are not in the same league.

stuartd2• 5 years ago

Backblaze is great, but it’s not a replacement for time machine (and I use both).

Being able to buy a new Mac and make it into an exact copy of the old Mac by using time machine is amazing - I’ve done it a few times over the years, and it still impresses me every time. Plus I have time machine backups from 2011 which I occasionally browse to see what my kids were up to then.

beezischillin• 5 years ago

My personal preference for a DAW is Studio One, it’s lovely. I like the efficient UI and it has all the features I ever wanted.

One of the sad ironies of my life is that once I switched to macOS and could’ve avoided all the annoyances and instabilities I’ve had with audio on Windows, I just never felt like making music again. Life is like that sometimes. :)

abandonliberty• 5 years ago

Bitwarden. Open source, independently auditable password manager. For something this important, it should be no other way.

oneplane4• 5 years ago

"Personally I am tired of using tech designed for and by managers and SWE's gunning for promotion and not personal empowerment or passion for personal computing"

Unless you have spoken to all managers and SWEs I doubt you can make such a blanket statement about the immense workforces at Microsoft, Google and Apple.

Sure, one could argue that Microsoft is profit-driven, Google might be marketshare-driven and Apple might be UX-driven, and all of those could be true (or at least true for a major subset of both the engineers and the targeted user group). But it would be a guess at best and not helpful to your personal situation or anyone else's.

egypturnash3• 5 years ago

Backblaze+others to match Time Machine

BB complements TM for me; it's super useful to have a local versioned backup that's updated every time I dock my laptop with the desk, and is also invisibly supplemented by a versioned backup of changes I've made that the OS maintains on unused space on the laptop's drive. Works even if I'm sitting at a cafe with all the radios turned off to get maximum life out of the battery.

Backblaze? Backblaze is there for in case my house burns down and I leave with nothing but the clothes on my back.

eikenberry2• 5 years ago

Not really the same. They switched from a proprietary platform to a free platform. That is a much larger jump than simply switching proprietary platforms with much larger costs and gains. They wanted control and switched to get it, whereas you just swapped out landlords.

monkeyfacebag4• 5 years ago

So first of all, I don’t think it’s true that the article describes a switch to 100% free software. For example, the author bought a mirrorless camera, which is going to run proprietary software. Second, and more importantly, I think your comment implies that the only lever of control is switching between free and non free software and I don’t agree with this. For example, I am now protected against Google terminating or otherwise locking me out of my account whereas I was not previously protected. Even though I disagree with your comment, I appreciate that free software has some advantages over proprietary software and I would not dispute the claim in general.

bogwog• 5 years ago

I switched to Apple from Android (still 100% Linux on desktop/laptop though) a few years ago, and I've grown to like it more than any Android phone I've owned...But it still sucks.

It feels like everything is overflowing with mediocrity, and there's no hope of it ever changing. I often have an idea for improving something that I see as being extremely shitty and perfect for improving/innovating, but there is no possible way for me to turn it into a successful product/business because the monopolists wouldn't allow it.

For example, why is the app store experience that same boring crap it has always been? Why can't that be fun, with like user profiles, Amazon-style reviews, Steam-style community features, social media-style feeds so you can sub to a developer, TikTok-style feeds of promo videos to discover new apps/games, etc. There's so much to explore there, but it's never going to happen because Apple doesn't allow it, and Apple themselves isn't going to do it because they're a monopoly and they have no incentive to (same goes for Google).

What are the chances that our government will wake up and do something about this limp noodle we call a tech industry? Or that some startup will "disrupt" these monopolists with something better and resist the multi-billion-dollar acquisition offers (backed by anti-competitive threats).

This makes me want to grab my old thinkpad and disappear into the woods. I'll become a hermit, using only my own+libre software and only returning to civilization when I need to replace the battery pack.

gnubison2• 5 years ago

It feels like everything is overflowing with mediocrity, and there's no hope of it ever changing.

I’d definitely think that about the Apple Store if they introduced some of the features that you suggested — that’s part of the problem. What one person considers an obvious innovation another person considers yet another newfangled UI design.

hn_throwaway_99• 5 years ago

Why can't that be fun, with like user profiles, Amazon-style reviews, Steam-style community features, social media-style feeds so you can sub to a developer, TikTok-style feeds of promo videos to discover new apps/games, etc.

Similar to the other comment, I read that with sheer horror. I specifically don't want to spend a lot of time in any app store. I want to find quality apps I'm looking for, download them and leave.

techwizard81• 5 years ago

Everybody has different interests and needs, but personally, I hope they never implement your suggestions for the App Store. I , like I’m sure a vast majority of the Apple user base , just want an App Store, not something filled with social features.

manicdee• 5 years ago

What's "fun" about following the developer of a particular piece of business or process support software?

Apple Store already has star ratings, user reviews, and links to publisher web sites. I don't use any of the social/community features of Steam, and I can't stand the amount of review-stacking that happens in Steam and Amazon.

The one area that Steam is useful is their discovery stream where Steam will show you more games that they think you might like — the catch being that if you like one RTS game, Steam will show you lots of RTS games and never show you Mass Effect, Torchlight, KSP, or Dad Dating Sim.

As to why Apple doesn't have a discovery stream, just look at Steam's problematic system and you'll understand: Apple doesn't have it because they haven't figured out how to do it in a way that makes sense and will help people discover apps that they'll enjoy.

There the Apple Store suffers is in discoverability: in some cases I've been looking for a specific app and the thing I'm looking for comes "under the fold" because a dozen other apps have paid to get higher rankings for that search term.

I do not want TikTok-style feeds of promotional material clogging up my App Store. I want to get in there, find the thing I want, then get out. I do not spend my life looking for inspiration from apps in the store.

ClumsyPilot2• 5 years ago

I use keepass for passwords, and save the password database inside OneDrive

arvinsim• 5 years ago

It really comes down to individual circumstances. I myself switched from Logic to Ableton just because it is cross platform(I have a PC and a MacBook)

Gelob• 5 years ago

Pixelator pro is awesome

alternatetwo• 5 years ago

I don't follow about Ableton, I'm still using 9 and it works just fine. You don't need to bump Ableton versions.

lostgame2• 5 years ago

...okay; but Logic provides its updates for free (since X), is cheaper; and provides a wealth more content than stock Ableton does in the form of Logic’s downloadable content.

greggman32• 5 years ago

I was so tired of trying to keep up with endless UI changes in Windows and Android.

iOS and MacOS both have endless UI changes as well.

iainctduncan2• 5 years ago

I would strongly advise you to think twice about switching to Logic. Apple has consistently dumbed down that product since they bought it, turning it entirely into a loss leader to sell you the Apple ecosystem. Logic was great when it was Emagic's baby, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole now. It is the archetypal example of a product steered by executive strategy instead of user interests.

If you need a low cost vendor neutral DAW, Reaper is the way to go. I'm a semi-professional musician, and well compensated software architecture consultant, so cost is not a factor in my software purchases for music, but when I want a linear-paradigm DAW, it's Reaper. That product is dope and the company is awesome.

monkeyfacebag4• 5 years ago

huh, ok. Can you say more about where you think Reaper outshines Logic? I have to say that as a non-pro, I was really impressed by what Logic offers for the price, especially coming from Ableton which seems to offer considerably less for considerably more money. My main use cases these days are: 1) hooking up my electronic drum kit via midi and using Logic's built in drum kits (these sound pretty good); 2) recording and processing spoken word. For both of these use cases, Logic seems superior to Ableton, which is the software I am most familiar with. I think Ableton's interface and user experience are vastly superior to Logic's overall, but for these use cases that difference isn't worth paying for. Thoughts?

peakaboo• 5 years ago

It's not like you have two choices only. Linux!

hammyhavoc3• 5 years ago

In what universe does switching to a Mac to use Logic make more financial sense than buying a license for Ableton Live?

For what it's worth: if anybody else is facing the same conundrum, choose an OS-agnostic DAW like Reaper, Renoise or Bitwig, then it doesn't matter what OS you're on.

nbzso7• 5 years ago

I done this with Affinity Designer and now when I successfully leaved marketing and public relations driven Apple, this decision is paying off nicely.

Running Affintiy Designer under Windows 10 VM is non issue.

OS-agnostic path is the only long-term way of working.

Now under Linux I use Resolve, BitWig and Reaper, Blender, Inkscape, Krita, Emacs and I feel confident that no corporation will dictate my workflow in the endless pursuit for world domination.

The reality is that we are living in some form of economic stagnation, worldwide changes are ahead and people will be poorer, this will drive Apples vision for 1000 dollars + smartphones and overpriced computers out of place. I have converted my business to ARCH and in the process saved a ton of money (previously dedicated to buy Apple Silicon). Now this money will be spend on my engineers not on some half-assed marketing plan from company out of touch.

The only software that kept me inside Apple Ecosystem was Sketch. Since pandemic started for good or bad Figma is taking Sketch market-share, I don't like SaaS for design paradigm, but we adapt to clients requirements not to our own taste. I used Inkscape for interface design long before Macromedia Fireworks to offer a specific solution. So I am set for the future.:)

vladstudio• 5 years ago

+1 for Pixelmator Pro. I just looked through my tool set (Figma, VSCode, Notion, a default browser, Pixelmator Pro), and the only Mac-specific app is PP - and it's awesome.

theandrewbailey• 5 years ago

Which is fine, because 50% of the time I am als an everyday user.

  pacman -S hunspell

ribit6• 5 years ago

I found this bit very interesting

I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me

Mainly because I feel exactly the opposite. I don’t find Windows, Linux or x86 technologically exiting anymore.Apple makes (IMO of course) the most technologically exciting CPUs, their GPUs are a breath of fresh air, I love their approach to UI, APIs and OS security.

intricatedetail2• 5 years ago

In the past people used to trade their freedom for shiny objects. Be careful.

ribit6• 5 years ago

What is this „freedom“ you are talking about? Are you suggesting that my experience somehow lacks freedom?

tombert3• 5 years ago

I mostly agree. For example, I think that Metal doesn't get the love it deserves outside of the dedicated macOS engineers. I feel like Metal is substantially cleaner than OpenGL and way easier than Vulkan, and I feel like the Linux folks really ignore this at their own peril.

I hate how closed-off a lot of their ecosystem can be, and the obvious "I prefer open source" that every engineer says, but I do honestly (and sadly) think that macOS is the least-bad *desktop OS out there right now.

jay_kyburz7• 5 years ago

I think the reason that Metal is not interesting people is that you can't run it outside Apples ecosystem. If you learn Vulkan, your code will run everywhere.

babypuncher4• 5 years ago

Metal is irritating because of its exclusivity. Nobody wants to make games just for macOS. The supposed ease and speed of writing Metal is completely lost since you still have to write a Vulkan or OpenGL renderer. It's just more busywork for anyone not exclusively targeting Apple platforms.

ribit6• 5 years ago

Metal is a beautiful API and as a hobbyist GPU programer I think Apple GPUs are what's really under-appreciated. Enthusiasts usually dismiss them as "mobile parts" and turn the blind eye to the very interesting features they bring:

- TBDR with user-programmable persistent GPU caches allow you to do some really cool things smartly, drastically cutting down the amount of work and memory fetched - GPUs are trivially exposed as what they are: machines with very wide SIMD ALUs - resource binding graphs with full support for pointers and indirection; resource bindings that can be created and populated on the GPU - sparse resources that actually work and are performant (nobody uses them on mainstream GPUs because they are apparently slow as f** there) - etc.

Invictus0• 5 years ago

What kind of ridiculous metric is "technologically exciting"? CPU/GPU speed is really just a cat and mouse game--soon enough an even crappier suite of Electron apps will make the M1 feel slow. Apple's UI approach is just terrible lately [0][1], and the OS security comment must be a joke in light of the CSAM scanning debacle--are you living under a rock?

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/22/ios-15-how-to-move-safari-ad...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559832

oreilles• 5 years ago

Placing the url at the bottom is brilliant UI wise considering the height of the average smartphone nowadays. And anyway they made this an option for those who wouldn't like it. The “mess" that was discussed in your second link (the hovering URL bar) was only present in beta version and has been removed from the release. Finally, CSAM scanning has nothing to do with OS security, but with privacy.

qaq• 5 years ago

OS Security ? NSO has what looks to be an infinite supply of remote arbitrary code execution exploits for the Apple ecosystem.

runjake3• 5 years ago

Not just the Apple ecosystem, pretty much every ecosystem, especially Android and Windows.

slownews453• 5 years ago

For a long time actually there were TONS of android exploits - either direct android or based on the installers companies put on phones they shipped.

That has changed massively recently, my sense is rough parity currently (on a clean android phone).

Payouts are still a lot higher per point marketshare for iOS though, so maybe still harder to develop.

ribit6• 5 years ago

NSO has an infinite supply of exports for pretty much every platform. It doesn't really matter what you run, if you are a high-profile target and don't take active counter-measures, you will be hacked. That's not what I am talking about.

Instead some things that have every day practical relevance for me:

- read-only mounted system volume that prevents me from doing stupid mistakes and accidentally sudo rm important files - application certificates - all executables being code-signed to prevent tampering - built in zero-knowledge password manager with automatic synchronization across all my devices - full hardware insulation for DMA devices on Apple Silicon

acmdas• 5 years ago

I love my 2011 MacBook Pro's hardware - the case, the keyboard, the hinges. I liked OS-X Lion just fine, and every update since then has seemed to be a downgrade...I still need to use the 2011 Office I bought then now and then, or I'd have converted it to Debian years ago.

grumpyprole3• 5 years ago

Sure the CPU is great, but the hardware is just too unrepairable and disposable. The software is also too much about Apple lock-in. For example, Apple Music can't even play FLAC files.

Maursault3• 5 years ago

the hardware is just too unrepairable and disposable

Pretty sure it was before the millennium when computers became cheap while the value of repair skills increased, it was no longer cost effective then to have the old malfunctioning computer of any make repaired. I expect you mean that you want to repair it yourself, but if you are skilled enough to do that, your time is valuable, so it hasn't been worth your time for at least two decades to spend even 10 hours a year repairing a machine more than about 3 years old. And AppleCare is worth the cost of extended warranty, so you don't have to repair it.

Apple Music can't even play FLAC files

That's just that software. VLC runs on Apple Silicon, so you don't need to use Apple Music, but if you did and want to play FLAC files, you'd need to transcode them to ALAC, Apple Lossless (or mp3 or aac for lossy). You could build and script ffmpeg to transcode all your FLAC files to ALAC in one CLI command, because lossless is lossless. I'm kind of curious just how fast Apple Silicon will do that... seconds I bet, because it takes only a couple minutes for my Core2Duo to transcode a full-length album of FLAC to ALAC.

brokenmachine• 5 years ago

I'll give you CPUs but I hate their "dumb it down" approach to UI, and Apple's only passion seems to be coming up with new ways to lock the user in and stop them from doing what they want with the PC they bought.

Apofis• 5 years ago

I have a really beefy System 76 laptop but after using the Mac Developer Transition Kit, I'm eagerly waiting for the Apple M2-based Macbook Pro. As much as I love Linux and linux-desktop, I miss the polish the MacOS has.

codazoda• 5 years ago

I'm the weird dude that uses a Mac and a Pixel phone. I'm a dev so I wanted the flexibility of being able to code for my phone without spending $99 a year. That's why I switched from iPhone to Android half a dozen years ago. It turns out that I just write web apps for my phone anyway. So, I'm thinking about switching back to iPhone. Maybe I just need a change every few years.

advael3• 5 years ago

Some things never change. Talk about switching OSes and the entire comment thread becomes about dancing around calling people wrong about their aesthetic UX preferences

I think if anything, this post illustrates that no matter how many people you pay to do it, there's no "objectively better" workflow for everyone, and preferences will always be individual

When I try to convince people to use *nix OSes or FOSS tools generally, my one and only argument is the value of having control, or, perhaps more saliently, not being controlled by the company that makes your tools. If that doesn't persuade you, then just use whatever you like best. Your preferences are your own, and no amount of supposed expertise or practiced snobbishness can make your preferences override mine, or vice versa.

whartung• 5 years ago

That's all well and good and noble. But I don't feel controlled by Apple. I have Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, Apple TV. The whole kit. I am "invested".

That said, I've never turned iCloud on, all my photos are on my phone or my computer, all my iTunes music is downloaded to my machine, free to take with me. (I also still buy physical CDs.) I don't sync anything.

The only place this isn't true is the Apple TV videos I've bought. Don't know where they are, but I don't really care to be honest. If Apple didn't know about my rental habits, Blockbuster would. What difference does it make.

I have enough dusty DVDs in my drawer that I don't think I'd miss if they suddenly vanished, I'm not that tied to the content I've purchased on Apple either. I know what I'm getting in to when I do it, and it's OK with me.

The other aspect would be the apps I've got from the App Store. If I were move off of iOS those wouldn't be coming with me anyway, so...no drama there.

And why do I not use iCloud? Not because of any big brother eyeball on me. I don't use it the same reason I don't use a Smart TV, or a "smart home", or anything else. It's just one more thing designed to make my life easier that simply won't. As soon as it messes up (and it WILL mess up, catastrophically, and at the worst time. Everyone has stories), whatever value its added will be washed away.

As I like to say, I love programming, but I hate computers. I hate messing with them, configuring them, tweaking them, googling for arcane stuff. I never want to hear the word "driver" ever again if I can avoid it.

My Macs and Apple stuff, that I use, pretty much "just works". I keep my profile as thin and light as possible. The printer works, on all my machines and devices! Hallelujah! Air Drop works! I can serve videos from my Mac to the my Apple TV. +1!

So, whatever control Apple has over me, I think the boot on my neck might instead just be a flip flop, and I can get up whenever I want.

mark_l_watson• 5 years ago

I don't disagree with you, I use Apple gear (plus one nice Chromebook and 2 Linux laptops) but I use iCloud, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. For sensitive backups, I ZIP + password protect my financial records, consulting client work materials when they ask me to keep copies for future support, etc.

I love messing around with my Linux laptops (and Chromebook with Linux container support), but for my main digital life, the integrations of Apple Watch + iPhone + iPad + MacBook Pro are the best option for me.

I would like to see a wider ecosystem and I keep hoping that Microsoft keeps improving the Windows experience and Linux distress keep improving.

EDIT: I am also a fan of Google, with some restrictions: I turn off all data collection settings except for music and YouTube for 30 days, and GCP for forever. PRIVACY IS POWER: you put yourself in a better position vs. corporations (and governments) if you take sensible privacy precautions.

advael3• 5 years ago

Again, use whatever you like most, but you're mistaking a lack of conflict with Apple for a lack of control. You like the way Apple's products work for you. Great. You can own media you've produced, and don't particularly care about the distribution model of media you consume. Awesome. These are all great reasons for you to want to use Apple's stuff

Personally, I like to save media I consume, and increasingly this is contrary to the business models of media companies. It's good that Apple lets you take your photos elsewhere, but I don't want them to have access to what's on my device, and the reality of Apple's ecosystem is that they have root on and internet-connected access to your devices, at least the smartphones.

Personally, I like using tools that I can rely on staying the same. If software I use to make things I want to make changes, I can go back and get a previous version. I can go fork it and change it if I desire. With proprietary tools, you take the risk that a change will be made and you won't like it. You take the risk that they'll decide to move to a subscription model and deny you use of a tool you've already bought unless you start paying the company on a schedule, as Adobe users have experienced recently. If these possibilities have never affected you and don't bother you, by all means, use the tools and services you like

lrvick• 5 years ago

Can you switch easily? Cheaply? Would you not need to sell all that hardware and fundamentally overhaul your technical life to switch away from Apple?

If Apple wants to deploy a new update that scans all your files for anything they deem undesirable, or bundles ads, or add backdoors... they can, knowing the cost of most users to switch is too high so they will tolerate it. Don't think they won't aid spying if the USG asks them extra nice.

Apple has totally sold control of their hardware in China to the Chinese government with full knowledge it will be used to help with genocide, all to maintain doing business there.

They will do whatever is the most profitable regardless of if it is aligned with your interests or not.

I only rely on open source software and best effort open hardware/firmware because freedom to me means no lock-in. No one can force me to take a software, firmware, or hardware update I don't want. My reliance on tech is highly flexible.

In my quest to become a more capable engineer it was worth the extra effort to learn how computers work well enough to make them do exactly what I want with whatever software, firmware, or hardware I want for both my personal and work life.

I built a career on those skills.

amelius• 5 years ago

That said, I've never turned iCloud on

Until Apple decides to use some dark-patterns to make you activate iCloud in a moment of inattentiveness. At that point, your own CDs and other data might be wiped from your computer, as has already happened to people.

https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/48830

irrational• 5 years ago

Wow, I had to check the username to make sure I didn’t write this. I kept nodding all the way through. The only area of divergence is I don’t have any Apple TV videos. Otherwise, we could be twins.

lnxg33k12• 5 years ago

You can't even install apps outside of the app store and don't feel controlled, i mean everyone is different and have different opinions but there needs to be a limit to the amount of ham on the eyes, what should they do more, handcuff you and put you in a genius bar decorated jail?

lostgame2• 5 years ago

My preferences are irrelevant when I can’t natively run the commercial software I require to do my job(s) on the OS you suggest.

If Linux can work for you - especially in your office - you are a privileged minority.

With MacOS, I get the underlying UNIX subsystem - and the ability to use commercial software, to boot.

Even Windows has WSL nowadays.

And you can downvote me - you can disagree with me - but deep down; you know nothing you can say is going to change the fact that - for example - I rely on Apple’s Logic Pro X; and have a decade and a half of Logic files.

It would take an immeasurable amount of effort to somehow extract the MIDI and audio data from those files, and somehow convert them into Ardour files.

I would lose EQ and compressor settings - and - even then, the plugins I use - iZotope and Native Instruments software, in particular - wouldn’t work.

That’s just one simple example - and there’s one of those for almost anyone.

The larger one is the corporate/enterprise situation, where proprietary applications are often hanging on by a thread with the office ecosystem as-is, and - no - they will not convert these applications over to Linux.

They won’t update those applications to start.

Linux is great, it’s awesome that it exists, and it can work for a very small minority of people.

advael3• 5 years ago

I agree that enterprise-level collusion has locked you and many others into proprietary platforms. Again, I advocate using whatever tools work best for you, if your priority is not control over your tools. Every year the FOSS ecosystems get more usable for more purposes, but if your job tells you you have to use a particular tool, then you don't really have much of a choice, as you say.

pdimitar6• 5 years ago

Not sure why you are downvoted.

It's indeed true that many times you don't have a say over what software or even OS you have to use for your work. For a lot of us the software devs we do have the choice -- but even then we naturally converge to macOS or Linux due to less friction and more productivity.

And yep, entrenching is basically the name of the game for most orgs. They are deathly scared of change. Linux will not change that. It changes the game for the professionals, not the companies (and even that is not 100% true; they still use Linux servers for almost everything).

axiosgunnar• 5 years ago

doesn't do video editing
doesn't do photoshop
doesn't create music
doesn't use specialized domain specific software such as CAD etc
doesn't play modern games
doesn‘t need to interact with people using ms office files

ok sure, you can entirely rely on linux if you want to code in the terminal, play some mp3s and store some jpgs.

but the presented use cases exclude vast groups of people

achenatx• 5 years ago

I use a mac because mac os X is much more stable, doesnt have a registry, has a *nix shell, doesnt seem to accumulate random stuff over time that slows the computer down to a crawl, and time machine is amazing. I have used it multiple times to immediately get up and running (once after my mac was stolen, once when I upgraded, once when my mac lcd died when I dropped it).

Im still using a 2015 macbook pro because I want my hdmi port and usb ports. I have a backup in case this one dies. Over time the computer has not slowed down at all.

I use android because the iphone system does weird things that I cant be bothered to figure out. For example we have icloud turned off everywhere, but icloud still manages to fill up and send messages. The iphone periodically requires authentication with a device I dont have on me (e.g. an ios device that I dont have in my possession). Text messages still get echoed to multiple devices meaning my kids and wife see each others' texts.

It is also still missing features that I need. The dialer still cant use T9. The calendar cant change the default snooze for 2 minutes before an event. It also wont keep reminding you if you dont kill the snooze.

My home desktop uses windows because it runs blue iris which manages my security cameras.

ggpsv• 5 years ago

I’m also running a 2015 mbp as my personal computer. Curious, which macOS version are you running?

desertraven• 5 years ago

Not OP. I’m running a 2015 MacBook Pro with Catalina. Going strong.

erikbye• 5 years ago

I think the only good thing about the Apple ecosystem is making money off it. Much easier to make a living selling apps on the app store than the play store.

danlugo92• 5 years ago

Much easier to go poof as well.

vinceguidry• 5 years ago

The last step...

Cute idea.

jay_kyburz7• 5 years ago

Come on, Nobody has raised the biggest most annoying Apple lock in. They Keyboard Shortcuts. It has taken me years to retrain my muscle memory.

sbuk• 5 years ago

You do realise that the keyboard shortcuts existed before Windows existed? Microsoft introduced ctrl+c/v/x, basing it on cmd-c/v/x in Windows 3.0...

jay_kyburz7• 5 years ago

I was attempting to humorously point out that after 10 years Apple shortcuts, it was very difficult to relearn how to type. Not just Copy/Paste, but Home/End and Page Up/Down, selecting lines and moving things around. They are all different in Windows Linux land.

I should have learnt Vi.

(And for the record, I like Apples better, and tried to emulate them on Windows for a while but It was never quite right)

asciimov• 5 years ago

Most of these bullet points could still be done on a Mac.

You don't need special permission, or a hacked computer, to do the things the non-apple way.

I moved to Linux 7 years ago from MacOS (and windows before that). As I get older, my patience wanes for dealing with the, half-baked house-of-cards teetering on collapse, Linux ecosystem. I just want something that works better, and took a different direction than the modern versions of Windows or MacOS.

Borlands• 5 years ago

Very personal opinion here: Apple innovated as hell, pure lab of goodness and years and years ahead of any other OS. Sad reality is that they are now a 100 billion mega megacorp, user is second in the money dance. I don’t see them as innovative, freedom (not as in free beer) means a lot and they don’t contribute to it at all, if anything even more closed ecossystem - long gone the days of OpenDarwin. Most people I know switched back to Windows for better drivers support. UX is still second to none in Apple, but at what cost? In the end, you want to press a button to turn on the system and get things done. I think there’s more than just Apple nowadays - but unique strengths in different contexts for sure

black_13• 5 years ago

Its impossible to do gnu toolchain devel on ios. I got tired of trying to sign the gdb debugger.

c544• 5 years ago

I respect this but the X1 Carbon's keyboard is bad, and so is its trackpad. Until something like this[0] project takes off, this is just a non-starter for me. Windows at least has OK trackpad support, and now with WSL and whatnot, the surface pro laptops are maybe a feasible option, but Windows ironically has the absolute worst window management of the 3.

And of course Apple is still a moving target. I'm not going back to a x86 toaster of a laptop with 5 hrs of battery life, when i can have one which stays cool for 11. Signs point to them ditching the touchbar too.

[0] https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...

[1] Disclosures / context:

- I have an X1 carbon for work

- I vastly prefer my M1 Macbook Pro

- I miss i3wm, i used to run it on laptop and desktop in college, on Arch.

royal_ts• 5 years ago

In which world is MacOS window management good? It's comically bad. The splittscreen feature alone is a bad joke

tzamora• 5 years ago

I use Hyperdock https://bahoom.com/hyperdock for macOS windows splitscreen and other features that makes the experience very very good and more similiar to windowsOS

wy35• 5 years ago

Agree, stock MacOS window management is really annoying. I’ve been using Rectangle to do split screen and maximizing windows, and I never had a problem since.

c544• 5 years ago

Agreed actually, I don't use the 'spaces' feature other than for fullscreen PDF reading.

For me, BetterTouchTool is a godsend though, i can use the trackpad to 'grab' and 'resize' windows without hunting for the little <-> thing that's for some reason 0.5 pixels wide :D. BTT implements all of Windows' snappy edges and corners and whatnot.

I use Raycast (https://www.raycast.com/) as a cmd+space replacement and it's great and quick too

MacOS is strangely more customizable than a lot of things

pdimitar6• 5 years ago

I lately bought a refurbished HP 15s with Ryzen 5500U (and AMD graphics). This thing runs way cooler than any Intel laptop I ever used in the past, even under load. The track pad is surprisingly good for a non-MacBook; still not as good but it's IMO fairly close.

I admit I don't care much about total time on battery though. I'm a dev and I need the full performance so never tinkered with power profiles and such. To me it's "100% the CPU power at all times or get out".

Just an anecdote.

c544• 5 years ago

Noted, will keep it in mind in the future!

firecall• 5 years ago

"I basically went back 5 or 10 years and replaced every "modern" technology solution. I pay now way more than I did with iCloud, but I am back in control. I am more productive."

But how are you are more productive?

In what ways did the revised toolset improve productive output?

What are you producing and how do these tools compare to each other?

To me, the 'more productive' argument is a bit of strawman.

Totally cool to change toolsets and all though :-)

pdimitar6• 5 years ago

This article could have sparked sympathy in me since I am gradually and slowly making my way to a full Linux dev workflow on a laptop with 2TB NVMe SSD, 32GB and a pretty good CPU (Ryzen 5500U) but... the kinda sorta ideological language the author used in the article is really unfortunate.

(And believe me, it's a huge cognitive dissonance to convince yourself out of using the iMac Pro as much as you can...)

Look, if it doesn't work for you anymore, alright. Move to Linux. Most of us the devs will eventually move to it anyway I think, since Apple just doesn't care about dev ergonomics -- especially with scanning each binary you run; try working under Linux for a week and you'll say to yourself "gosh, computers can be FAST!" -- but truthfully, many employers don't care about our ergonomics as well and they are OK with the lost productivity of waiting for tools to just... run, you know.

I agree Apple Music is a train wreck though, that's a fact.

In any case, I wish people learned to just make two small lists with pros and cons and be done with it. Using language like the quote in the start:

I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.

...is true to an extent but it gives you exactly zero things that are actually and visibly wrong. (Obviously this is an exaggeration, e.g. they mention subscription model vs. paying for stuff once which is valid, but my overall point is about things that are technical, not business-level.)

So, good for him I suppose but the article could have been written in a much more compelling and factual manner.

Klonoar4• 5 years ago

especially with scanning each binary you run

You do realize you can disable a healthy chunk of this stuff, right? A dev might not want it, but end users (non-technical, as much as this term annoys me) benefit from it.

Disable SIP (recovery mode dance) and disable GateKeeper (spctl) and you're off to a decent start.

They even document it, it's not hidden: https://help.apple.com/xcode/mac/10.2/index.html?localePath=...

pdimitar6• 5 years ago

Oh yeah, I am aware. But I don't buy a Mac to tinker with it. The huge price mark-up is for the "it just works" part in the package.

Plus I am very scared when it comes to Mac security. I am pretty sure that to this day their mitigation strategy is "almost nobody is writing viruses for Mac anyway". :D I will not risk disabling SIP especially with programs like Chrome on my Mac.

The sad part is that they _can_ make it work better and be faster but they don't want to. That's why in a few years time my iMac Pro is simply going to be the most expensive day-to-day desktop machine in a 1km radius and I'll use a cheap Ryzen laptop (or expensive Threadripper workstation) for actual work.

cepher• 5 years ago

I use linux+i3 at work, but personally have a mac. The main thing stopping me from ditching the mac is how convenient it is to swap files/photos between the iphone and mac, whether it’s through icloud or airdrop. Perhaps a nice solution exists for transferring files between iphone and linux, but I haven’t found one.

musicale• 5 years ago

I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.

There is some truth to Apple's engineering being directed by product managers who want raises - which (given that Apple is a large company) would generally require directing it toward Apple's bottom line and promoting Apple's goods and services.

At the same time there are a number of smart people at Apple, in both product management and engineering, who work there in order to advance good design, ease of use, reliability, privacy, and the development of computing technology that benefits and empowers its users - and not just the company that sells it.

Moreover, pretty much everyone at Apple knows that you don't create transformative products by bean counting and risk aversion.

But if you want something built by and for a community of technical enthusiasts, hobbyists, researchers, and hackers/tinkerers, open source software and disaggregated systems may be a superior ecosystem for you, and that's a good thing because a vibrant enthusiast and free/open software and hardware community provides many benefits to the world.

gigel82• 5 years ago

Can't we all just get along !? :)

FWIW, I've used iPhones for 11 years, I've had a bunch of iPads for media use on-the-go and kids, and I even have a macbook pro that my employer provided (a very nice $3,000 monitor riser)

But most of my home machines are Windows 10. I've lived in the MS ecosystem since the DOS 3 era and that's where I feel most at home. Using macOS is a frustrating experience for me, it feels like a toy environment (though I'm sure some folks feel the same about Windows if they've grown up in the mac world).

That said, I've been toying with Linux every now and then; I've got a couple of Raspberry Pis in the house that I self-manage (for things like pi-hole, nas, vpn tunnel, etc.), I've been using WSL2 and Docker on my PCs and even have an older laptop running Arch that I sometimes poke at. I regret not getting more serious into Linux before; it's difficult to switch now, but I don't like where MS is taking Windows (funneling everyone into their Bing / ADs with Edge being pushed aggressively and search / news being shoved more and more deeply into the OS) so I'll have to begrudgingly leave my place of comfort in search of lost freedom.

pdimitar6• 5 years ago

I am super happy with Manjaro. I only briefly tried Arch and when I realized I have to manually assemble everything I expect from an everyday OS I was just "NOPE!" and went to Manjaro. Very happy user.

Even their installer is actually a live environment where you can do whatever you like, and you also have the "Install Manjaro" button on your desktop. A ready and working desktop environment for you to do stuff in while the OS is installing. A rarely well-polished Linux experience.

I agree macOS feels like a toy. I use it full time for 2.5 years now and I still can't shake this feeling. Both on Windows (ever since 98 and all the way to 10) and several Linux GUI flavours I used, I could make keybinds for literally anything and everything and basically optimize my machine for super productivity. With macOS that's either not easy or requires buying several software packages to do.

utopcell• 5 years ago

First thought after finishing the article: "Hmm, so there's more of us out there".

csomar2• 5 years ago

I get where the OP is coming from. A bit more than a year ago, I also made the move to Linux (Arch/Sway). Granted, it was a challenge to set everything up, especially when you are used to everything "working" from the get-go.

But I see the value now. I also think that Arch/Sway/Wayland is stable enough to be usable for serious work. In fact, I don't think I can get back to macOS anytime soon. Every time I use Windows/mac I feel that the operating system is getting on the way.

But there is a small price to pay: Custom configuration. My setup consists of Sway, Vivaldi, Skype, and Alacritty (tmux). I have three screens (and found Linux to be more stable in supporting that than macOS); two are terminals/tmux and one is the browser. I have a small program launcher (dmenu) and a custom clipboard logger. That's all there is to my setup. Everything else is noise. Once you get used to that, you can't go back.

I also have Skype, OpenSnitch, Eaton Power management, Docker (with a Bitcoin node and bunch of other ), around 90-100 open tabs in Vivaldi, encrypted hard-drive, automatic backups to a NAS/mounted volumes, and multiple tmux sessions open. I only restart my PC for updates, and it has been constantly running for close to a year now. I don't remember ever coming to bug that requires a restart. I had some issues with browsers before, but I can kill them and start again. The environment is so lag-free that it's ridiculous. I switch tabs, programs, terminals, sessions, etc... with a 0 human-noticeable lag. That's impossible to achieve in macOS or Windows. (at least in Windows with the same machine).

jadbox• 5 years ago

Sway and i3 are absolutely spectacular tools. If Sway just added a Start menu and a settings UI panel for usability, I would advise anyone to use it over any other desktop manager. It would be awesome if someone created something like Sway for Windows (I've tried all the options out there, PowerToys Tiles comes close).

csomar2• 5 years ago

I agree but that risks bloating Sway. There are many options for a start menu (dmenu for example) and a settings panel is not a possibility since the configuration is too sophisticated to be simplified in an interface. If you do really need a settings menu, you can install the Gnome one and it works for the most part.

mtc010170• 5 years ago

I share some of the author's viewpoints and am similarly disheartened by some of the decisions Apple has made over the last several years.

That said, there's a trope displayed in this post that's getting especially old to me on HN, and that's the: "POs/PMs ruin everything (or are useless), and all they care about is getting a raise or promotion.. not the technology (or the users, or the product)."

I find the tribalism baked into this oft-repeated viewpoint super annoying. And I believe the author, and others parroting these ideas.. are projecting a viewpoint all over the place without much substance.

And I think it's actually harmful to organizations and teams working effectively together. So maybe we should look a little deeper and leave the engineers-are-better-than-everyone-else bigotry out of it.

BrightGlow• 5 years ago

The other HN Linux user trope here is the (sadly predictable) fetishization of tiling window managers. I used these for years and they're really not that great. If you ask me these exhibit the exact same problem the author is trying to get away from. There are dozens and dozens of them, none of them are really that interesting or novel, so they change around the keybinds and come up with weird and obscure features just to try to stand out from the crowd. It's really a mess. And plus, basically all of them are broken when it comes to a mouse-driven workflow. I find them to be completely unusable for doing anything besides programming and typing documents.

daemonhunter• 5 years ago

My problem with macOS is that I bought a mac expecting free OS updates. However since my macbook is my desktop killer, I have multiple external monitors connected with USBC to HDMI adapters. Everything I have seen since Big Sur indicates external monitors are iffy in big sur. I'm sorry, I'm not wrecking my environment because apple hasnt seen fit to fix external monitors in over a year.

Mister_Snuggles• 5 years ago

I know that M1-based Macs can only support one external monitor, but Intel-based ones can support at least two.

I'm able to run two external monitors, plus the internal display, on my work 2017 15" MBP and my personal 2017 13" MBP. The 13" MBP is running Big Sur, but work hasn't approved that for the 15" one yet.

Big Sur has given me no issues with the multi-monitor setup.

cnst• 5 years ago

The demise of Aperture, iPhoto, good keyboards and the introduction of the touch bar were just a few signs that product owners were in charge who rather wanted a raise by trying something "new" instead of technical owners who wanted to help creative people getting work done.

This is exactly how I feel.

Way too much software is being developed in the Resume Driven Development these days.

Touch Bar is a prime example of this. It solves a nonexisting problem in an imperfect way. It's a mere copycat from Optimus Keyboard, except that in Optimus each individual key was still a physical key.

The same goes for the vast majority of the web 2.0 front end frameworks, which reduce user experience, but add to the resume of people who implement all of that nonsense. The new versions of Slashdot and Reddit are prime examples — slower, less usable and accessible, but, hey, all the newest frameworks and buzzwords!

ElijahLynn• 5 years ago

ARCH LINUX FTW!!! Best distro evah!!! (because of the AUR)

softwarebeware• 5 years ago

I am quite sympathetic to the author’s viewpoint and have quite a few behaviors that are similar. I share files to my friends from my own server at home via aft.

But I don’t know if I fully buy the argument here. Mac OS is a scriptable environment and nothing even requires you to have an iCloud account or use all the Apple ecosystem stuff on a MacBook. My work laptop is a MacBook and I still use only open source stuff on it, which I script for greater productivity, and it feels very efficient.

freetime22• 5 years ago

I switched from a MacBook Pro to a Linux desktop a couple years ago - not for philosophical reasons, but just because I felt like at the time the performance per dollar spent was much better if I built my own machine with an AMD CPU. Switching was really no big deal - there are plenty of good alternatives out there to Apple apps, and Apple also has browser-based versions of a lot of their iCloud apps if you need to access files or Photos from a Linux PC. And I have continued to use other Apple devices in my home without any real issues.

Now with the success Apple has had with the M1 chips, and how they seem to be fixing their keyboard issues, I would definitely consider buying a MacBook Pro if the new models look compelling.

I guess my point here is that being fully committed to the "Apple Ecosystem" isn’t as big a deal as some people make it out to be. You don’t have to be all-in or all-out on Apple. It’s something to consider when making a purchasing decision, but at the end of the day you should just buy the thing that works best for your needs and budget, regardless of who makes it.

throwoutway• 5 years ago

I bought one of the new “fixed” keyboards and have a stuck key, just barely past warranty. Apple quoted me 400-500 to fix it

They definitely have not “fixed” the keyboard.

tuananh• 5 years ago

i'm leaving the apple ecosystem too but it's because:

- development on linux is superior. docker works faster. the number of packages available on linux. for devops tooling cli, linux is still first class citizen, bit higher than macos.

- tiling windows manager is hella better than those available on macos (yabai, amethyst, etc..)

- the hardware is cheaper, and even more powerful (for the same price).

bacan• 5 years ago

I use Linux for all my server environments, but it just cannot compare to MacOS for Desktop use. The app ecosystem is severely lacking.

Linux doesn't even have a decent modern email app. The best option there is Thunderbird, which is quite good but not really on-par with the offerings on Mac. Apps like Sparrow, Mimestream, Spark etc have no Linux equivalent. Mimestream is my choice due to its deep Gmail integration.

And this is just email.

torstenvl2• 5 years ago

I like Mailspring on macOS, and it's available for Linux (electron app). Have you tried it?

xedrac• 5 years ago

Hard disagree. For me, Linux is easily twice as productive as MacOS. I think it's more about what you're used to.

pram2• 5 years ago

The point about Bandcamp is frankly baffling. I love the website and I’ve spent too much money there on vinyls, but their library is not a replacement for a streaming service. Not even close.

I’ve seen very few releases on Bandcamp that weren’t already present in Apple Music/Spotify/Tidal etc.

katabasis• 5 years ago

This person uses a Fuji digital camera, but they don't mention what software they intend to use for photo editing. I shoot with the same camera and do a lot of hobby photography; one of the things that keeps me from seriously considering Linux for personal use is the lack of Lightroom/Capture 1 for editing photos. Are any of the Linux apps (Darktable, etc) reasonably intuitive/comparable in terms of features now?

hatsunearu• 5 years ago

darkroom is kinda janky as OSS software tends to be, but the amount of control and the feature set is incredible. Nothing on the market comes close to it.

linuxhansl• 5 years ago

As a Linux user for the past 20 years or so I agree 100%.

The first few years it was actually some work - compiled my own custom kernels, installed a lot of extra software I needed from source. But over the years that became less and less necessary. Kernels just work, all software I need is already packaged.

These days I just install Fedora (in my case, I assume Arch, Ubuntu, etc would have the same results) on my Desktops/Laptops and it just works.

Now, for work I still happily use a MacBook, but that Laptop is not mine anyway; I am aware and do not mind that my employer and Apple control it for me.

Similarly my private phone is an unlocked Pixel and my workphone is an iPhone.

jhatemyjob• 5 years ago

ugh. these threads pop up every month. OP didnt even leave the apple ecosystem, he still has an iPhone

nbzso7• 5 years ago

This resonates deeply with what I see and feel about Apple.

If you check my posts here I started being vocal about my personal Apple problems, before this I happily browsed here on HN (2008) and did not express my thoughts, mainly because here I have learned so much and witnessed startups becoming well established businesses. But something clicked after Mac Pro was released, a computer delayed for so long, that to solve my business problems I had to build several Hackintoshes.

I hoped that this time Apple will be focused on professional audience, without any tricks but no. Wheels and 1000 buck monitor stands? WTF. And the pricing. OMG. Clearly this was a message: You wanted professional computer, you will pay the premium to stay in the Ecosystem.

Fast forward to 2021. CSAM on the macOS, but trust us we will make it better?

No way Apple. No f-ng way. This is my property, my data is my property. I don't care what shenanigans your lawyers are buried in the EULA, and what is "publicly responsible thing". You create user technology. Users have full responsibility how they will use it by law. Can you imagine your kitchen knife to check what meat you trying to cut with it?

Because this will be the logical "tech" direction. Let's check you washing machines for illegal content. What about your Apple Car?

What about your iOS security? Pegasus/NSO, what about big bounties for security researchers, richest company of the world did not have enough to invest in effective Red Teams? GTFO.

So this was the "final straw" for me. Now my company runs ARCH on old Apple hardware and all the money that I have saved to participate in Apple's Arm transition will go towards solutions with maximum professional control and privacy.

Instead of Mac Pro I plan to have this thing: https://bit.ly/3zxlkBS.

Instead of buying Apple's iSpy devices I will run old Pixel with Graphene OS or dumb flip phone.

There are a lot of tech savvy pros that don't care. I know. They have not lived in Apple land and still thinking that "easy way" is the right way.

That the ecosystem gives more than it takes away. That may be if they participate in this monopoly they will find a small or big business success. Apple has you, by the balls. UX from hell painted with good intentions and lack of responsibility.

I on other hand will never run my data on something that is not FOSS. And will invest my money in adequate hardware solutions.

And when time comes to give some "consumer" advice I will be honest to my customers and friends. A small contribution, previously reserved for Apple hardware and software. Not anymore.:)

TheRealNGenius• 5 years ago

Lots of spelling errors in there, very distracting

rswail• 5 years ago

So I moved from the Linux world to the Apple world about 5 years ago when my work computer became a Mac Mini.

My phone has been an iPhone since 3GS.

Just looking at the apps I use on my mac, the only "Apple" apps are Messages (along with a bunch of others like Zoom and LINE and Telegram and Skype and Whatsapp for different groups/work) and Photos.

I use Office 365 for Mac and OneDrive because it has a free 1TB as part of the sub.

I was backing up using Time Machine to an SMB box running Ubuntu, but Time Machine with APFS over SMB is painfully slow and unreliable. I went and bought Arq and it replaced my back up needs. If/When I need to bring up a new machine, I'll use Apple's stuff to do that.

I've also got the following:

* Macports: Has all of the OSS/CLI tools, libraries etc. Better than homebrew because it doesn't do stupid tricks with /usr/local and root privileges and works with the Apple frameworks cleanly

* Office 365: Needed for work purposes, I use OneDrive with Arq as a remote backup location.

* Firefox: Never seen the need to use any other browser

* Thunderbird: Happy enough as a mail client, use fastmail as my mail server.

* iTerm2: Awesome terminal that integrates with tmux and other stuff

MacOS free utilities I use:

* Karabiner-Elements: Allows me to map my EU ISO WASD keyboard

* Rectangle: Gives me keyboard window placement/sizing

* Stats: Menu bar widgets for CPU/Network etc

Along the way I've bought various MacOS utilities:

* Pathfinder: Replacement for Finder that has more features

* Bartender: Keeps my menu bar clean of unnecessary widgets unless they are doing something "interesting"

* Dash: Awesome documentation tool

vkaku• 5 years ago

We could all use posts like this:

Leaving the Insert Big Tech ecosystem behind

The deal is that capital is very cheap for Insert Big Tech and the cost of customer acquisition is so easy. So at some point, the economies of scale and subsequent monetization can only be reversed by intentionally moving to smaller providers or making informed choices on supporting other businesses.

IMO - This is not a convenience factor for most people, but for those willing to embrace it, it will open up your way - and compensate many software companies very well.

weystrom• 5 years ago

I've tried to switch to Linux multiple times. Something is always broken.

Primary example is hidpi support. My laptop has a 1440p screen and I use a 1080p external one. And then sometimes I disconnect it and go into a meeting room or something to work without an external display.

I set 200% scaling for laptop screen when I'm at the desk and 150% when I'm out and about.

Simple usecase, but I've never managed to make it work properly and consistently. It's been like that for the last 3 years. I just keep coming back to Windows where it works perfectly.

Wayland keeps getting better, but some important apps don't support it yet. For example there IS a build of VSCode that works on Wayland, but it freezes up if you move the window between displays with scaling on.

And then there is KDE wayland session, that still loves to crash if you pull out the second screen DP cable "wrong".

Linux is not there yet, and honestly, I'm not sure if it will ever be. It might me destined to forever play catch-up with the "big-tech" OSes.

On top of that, how do you even beat the level of vertical integration that Apple has with M1 chips and MacOS?

Dah00n2• 5 years ago

This would be more relevant if HN wasn't getting posts about the same problem with Apple laptops over and over again. In my opinion it is broken in Linux but works better than on Macs.

8fingerlouie2• 5 years ago

I used Linux from 93 until around 2000, and while i'm aware that the state of the Linux Desktop is completely different today, and as a stand alone product may even compete with Windows/MacOS, the Apple ecosystem is something that is not yet beaten on Linux. People may think it is, but that's mostly because they were never "all in" on the Apple ecosystem.

Copy / Paste across devices, handoff of documents, synchronization of files that actually works and won't get stuck for weeks updating a file.

As for iCloud, one thing that Google/Microsoft/etc don't get is family sharing. We share a 2TB iCloud plan across the family, and while the plan is tied to my credit card, the data is not "mine". If i die tomorrow my credit card dies with me, and presumably so does my iCloud subscription, but all my family needs to do is start paying for another plan, and their data "magically" transfers from my icloud subscription to theirs.

The Apple ecosystem is not without flaws though. Personally i would love for TimeMachine (or 3rd party tools) to be able to backup iCloud storage without having to synchronize data locally first. I keep a Mac Mini for the purpose, which also acts as a content cache for iCloud storage, meaning most file access from our house is done at "LAN speed", but i would love to simply click a setting on my macbook and it would "magically" include that content in the backup.

elsonrodriguez• 5 years ago

I used Linux from 93 until around 2000, and while i'm aware that the state of the Linux Desktop is completely different today

Nope. I just installed Ubuntu 20.04 and within a few days I was messing with xrandr commands to get the HDMI resolution set to anything but 800x600.

Linux will never be good on the desktop. Not because there are too many cooks in the kitchen, but because there's too many biochemists in the commune.

Leaving the Apple ecosystem behind

Related Stories