Observations & Personal Experiences From A Mac User

[Synthetic Frost]

I realize I'm kinda stepping into the proverbial wolves' den here, especially considering that LTT entertains a pretty healthy hardware savvy community, but I'd like to address a few things and answer a few questions that I often see on the LTT forums, and indirectly on some of LTT's own videos when Macs and macOS are talked about.

 

First of all, not all Mac users are rabid fans just looking for their latest fashion statement. In fact if you actually go to Mac-centric forums, especially developer forums, places where you get more than people just gloating about their new purchase, you'll actually find that a great many of us who actually use Macs on a power user or professional level hate the hardware every bit as much as PC users do. Sure, we have nice 5k displays and NVMe SSDs, which we love, but a huge portion of us would buy a Mac with the lowest specs and then upgrade it with aftermarket parts because Apple was so famous for gouging us on things like RAM and storage. It wasn't until the last few years or so when Apple started soldering everything that we were forced to pay the full price for a fully equipped Mac from the store. We don't like the limited hardware options any more than you do.

Now, I was actually impressed that Linus put out a video that stated that a comparatively specced PC costs about the same as a Mac. Because he's right. It does. The big thing though is that Apple puts all the money into parts that most people would rather spend on something else. We Mac users actually tend to lean more in the PC user camp here. I myself would rather Macs have better GPUs and a more aggressive fan curve.

So why the heck do we buy Macs at all if we hate the hardware as much as you do? There's really only one answer here:

 

The OS. Power users and developers like myself buy Macs more for the OS than the hardware. 

I want to be clear here with my own personal experience with computers. I grew up in the mid '80's with DOS on a 386. As the years went on I had Pentiums with Windows, and I was a very geeky kid. I was very much into gaming and modding. I used to make community maps and mods for games like Quake and Unreal Tournament. I was very entrenched in PC culture. I didn't really even touch Macs until late into high school in the mid 90's when my friend had an iMac G3 running OS System 7. It was the first time I'd actually seen Mac OS up close, and it intrigued me. I really liked the GUI of Mac OS right from the get go.

This piqued my interest enough to start looking into Apple. At the time the company was near death, but their OS seemed legitimately better than what Microsoft was offering with Windows 95 and Windows 98. Having already done some development work on Windows by this point, I can tell you that I really didn't like it. Coding on windows in those days was a complete mess. There weren't very many API standards that were adhered to, and in fact you often had to purposely break your code to get it to run "properly". And to be frank, I hated the command syntax in DOS anyway. It never quite did what I thought it should. Things always seemed just a little bit off whenever I tried to have DOS or Windows run a script I'd written.

The Windows GUI also bothered me to no end. No two programs/apps ever seemed to follow the same rules or conventions, and settings that I used daily were often buried under several, several layers of right-click contextual menus. Everyone I talked to about it had mostly just accepted things as they were, and told me to get over it. But it just always ate at me. I needed a GUI that followed it's own guidelines and rules. Windows just... didn't.

When Windows XP hit, that was kind of the last straw for me. The move from DOS to NT was a very welcome change, but you still had to use an emulated DOS prompt for most things if you spent much time in the command-line like I did, and the Fisher Price theme of XP wasn't doing it any favors in my book. So I started remembering how much I liked the look of Mac OS. This was about the time that Apple was promoting a big move to Mac OS X, which was not only their tenth OS, but was a major departure from OS 9 because OS X (ten, not ex) was to be the love child of UNIX and Steve Job's own OS, NeXTStep. So the "X", the roman numeral for ten, was a pretty brilliant marketing tactic.

But I didn't have the money at the time for a Mac, so I started looking at other *nix alternatives, and as luck would have it, Linux was just becoming popular among the geekiest of geeks as a decent desktop OS with it's new GNOME and KDE environments. So I gave it a try on my existing 733Mhz Pentium 3 PC. I went with Gentoo, and I actually ended up loving Linux. The *nix command-line environment made a lot more sense to me than DOS, and I picked it up a lot faster than I had DOS or Windows. I ended up using a bunch of Linux distros over the years ranging from Gentoo to Debian to SuSE, and eventually to Arch.

I spent those couple years after high school working janitorial jobs saving up so I could afford a laptop for college since I couldn't very well take an old desktop with me, and I had my sights set on one thing. A brand new Powerbook G4.

Now, I want to stop and make something very clear. At this point in time in the early 2000's, at the height of Apple's resurgence from near death, and their now famous iPods, their PowerPC based Macs were of much better build quality than the Macs made today. Powerbooks even had user-replaceable batteries. So don't think that Macs have always sucked. They haven't.

After a lot of hard work, I ended up buying that Powerbook G4, and to this day it's been my favorite computer that I've ever owned. It had Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar on it, and right from the moment I turned it on I noticed that every app on it had a very consistent theme. Now, I wasn't a huge fan of this Aqua theme from early Mac OS X, but the UI guidelines & rules about what settings went where was at least consistent across all of Apple's apps.

After settling into Apple's developer ecosystem, I learned that Apple was much more consistent and strict about GUI spacial guidelines. The Dock at the bottom of the screen was a major outlier as it broke just about every guideline in the developer documentation, but it was Apple's big ticket at presentations, so we kind of ignored it.

Over time, I ended up just falling in love with Mac OS X and it's developer tools and APIs. Every new OS Apple was releasing in that era, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, etc, was a major step towards making my life as a developer easier. Microsoft's Visual Studio and it's APIs had nothing on Xcode. Apple supplied templates for common UI elements that we as devs were free to use in our own apps, and we could essentially get most of all of the features built into Mac OS for free by writing a couple lines and linking to Apple's own CoreAPIs for things like window animations and system-wide spellchecking.

On Mac OS X, I could build an app from scratch in a fraction of the time I spent doing the same on Windows, and the code was a lot cleaner to boot. It felt like using one of Apple's own apps supplied with the OS. Mac OS also had automated multithreading via Grand Central Dispatch and a native 64-bit kernel with 64-bit app support long before Windows did. At least in the consumer space.

Long story short, in the mid 2000's, Mac OS's code from the kernel up was cleaner and a lot more stable than Windows. It was just a much, much better OS with cleaner, better, and more lightweight code, and better guideline standards for it's GUI. I said back then that it was at least 10 years ahead of Windows at the time, and I still stand by that statement today. Because it was.

Today however is a very different matter. While MacOS was way ahead of it's time in the mid 2000's, in terms of it's GUI, it hasn't really hardly changed since then. While MacOS has stagnated, Windows has seen extreme changes as it went through the growing pains of Vista/7, through 8, and now to Windows 10.

Today, even as a guy that just loves macOS, I have to admit that Windows 10 has all but caught up. I still think the Windows GUI is still kind of a mess, but in all honesty, I think MacOS's GUI has actually regressed a fair bit in terms of Apple following their own UI guidelines, so I'd say they're about the same now. I still like MacOS's keyboard shortcuts and navigation better, but that's more personal taste than anything else. Windows is coming a long way now with getting a Linux shell and kernel, and I love that.

Currently, I run a hackintosh (a vanilla hackintosh, as in not one made from Tonymacx86 or his stolen tools used in his unibeast installer), with a 6700k CPU and a GTX 1080, and it's the most powerful "Mac" I could ask for. I dual-boot macOS and Windows 10, and use both OS's about equally. I have the best of both worlds. The best OS on good gaming-grade hardware without running into the "but it's not Windows" issues real Macs still occasionally run into.

I realize that this post is far, far longer than I originally intended, and I realize that very few have actually made it this far reading it, but I do want to make just one more thing clear about MacOS. And if any of you read this post, this is what you'll likely care about:

macOS doesn't suck at gaming anymore.

Thanks to Apple's Metal API, which is really just a port of Mantle, the same as DX12 and Vulkan, a whole lot of devs on the Mac side of things have made extreme strides in porting games even as old as Batman Arkham City to the new Metal API, and when you put macOS on decent GPU and PC hardware, like a hackintosh, macOS achieves an almost perfect performance parity in games with Windows. It's not the OS holding Macs back from gaming. It's the terrible GPUs Apple uses. Thus, gaming on MacOS is actually thriving, and Steam and GOG actually have huge Mac sections to their stores now with some of the best games on the market now on macOS.

For those of you who took the time, thank you for reading.

[Radium_Angel]

39 minutes ago, Synthetic Frost said:

For those of you who took the time, thank you for reading.

Here's the problem with Apple in a nutshell:

 

They don't make their profit on computers any more. It's iPhones, iPads and everything else but systems. Computers seem to be an afterthought to Apple these days.

And it's only going to get worse...

 

[Synthetic Frost]

4 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Here's the problem with Apple in a nutshell:

 

They don't make their profit on computers any more. It's iPhones, iPads and everything else but systems. Computers seem to be an afterthought to Apple these days.

And it's only going to get worse...

 

Oh I know. I'm fully aware. That's *why* macOS has actually regressed in some ways over the last few OS releases. But some people like myself are still passionate about the OS we use on the desktop, and for the time being, macOS is still really, really good.

[fewt]

36 minutes ago, Synthetic Frost said:

Oh I know. I'm fully aware. That's *why* macOS has actually regressed in some ways over the last few OS releases. But some people like myself are still passionate about the OS we use on the desktop, and for the time being, macOS is still really, really good.

I completely agree.  I've been using macOS since switching from Linux around 6 years ago, and I find it a lot more useful to me than I did Windows or Linux.  I view an operating system as a tool, and I expect it...like any good tool to stay out of the way unless I need it.  macOS shines in this regard.  Since I was something of a Linux power user, I needed a command line with a native toolchain (AWK, SED, GREP, BASH, RUBY, GIT, etc..).  Again, macOS delivered.

 

From an applications perspective, I'm usually able to use applications available on Windows as well as Linux in addition to macOS native apps that aren't available on either of those other platforms.  That's been very handy in daily use.

 

From a hardware perspective, that's where Apple has really started to fall over.  In the race to thin they've managed to remove user serviceability and upgradeability which is a huge problem for me.  I don't expect that there will be much of a shift back to the "good old days" which is kind of sad, but fortunately there are other ways to run macOS for the time being.

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, Synthetic Frost said:

passionate about the OS

Tell me about it, I was a die-hard BeOS fanatic, for the 5 seconds it was useful way way back when.

1 hour ago, fewt said:

I view an operating system as a tool, and I expect it...like any good tool to stay out of the way unless I need it

Totally agree, unfortunately Win10 gets in the way of *everything* you want to do one way, or another. I flatly refuse to use that OS. *nix gets out of the way, when you can find applications for your workflow (and yes, I'm an Ubuntu fan, up to 14.04 LTS anyway, they lost me after that) 

 

Operating Systems should get patches, security updates and nothing else. New features are the realm of application devs. I want my OS to be a constant solid thing, the underlying bedrock for which my workflow (photography in this case) can function. This new trend of Win10 adding/changing/breaking new stuff every patch is a critically flawed way of thinking. It's bad form, and worse function. I won't want to turn on my PC one day and find some small doo-dad I needed stopped working because MS decided to fiddle-fuck with it, or remove it altogether.

 

MacOS seems to be going this way as well, with the recent announcement that they are killing off Aperture for....nebulous reasons...

[fewt]

56 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

Tell me about it, I was a die-hard BeOS fanatic, for the 5 seconds it was useful way way back when.

Totally agree, unfortunately Win10 gets in the way of *everything* you want to do one way, or another. I flatly refuse to use that OS. *nix gets out of the way, when you can find applications for your workflow (and yes, I'm an Ubuntu fan, up to 14.04 LTS anyway, they lost me after that) 

 

Operating Systems should get patches, security updates and nothing else. New features are the realm of application devs. I want my OS to be a constant solid thing, the underlying bedrock for which my workflow (photography in this case) can function. This new trend of Win10 adding/changing/breaking new stuff every patch is a critically flawed way of thinking. It's bad form, and worse function. I won't want to turn on my PC one day and find some small doo-dad I needed stopped working because MS decided to fiddle-fuck with it, or remove it altogether.

 

MacOS seems to be going this way as well, with the recent announcement that they are killing off Aperture for....nebulous reasons...

 

Win10 really does, I use Bootcamp to play a game or two and since I don't use it daily before I can play I have to deal with the mandatory patching and rebooting that comes along with it.   I'm perfectly fine with OSs having some basic apps, but to your point, it is very annoying when an application that you've come to depend on is deprecated.  Especially when the application that replaces it is less functional.

[Synthetic Frost]

I guess the real reason I made the original post (that I know no one's bothering to read) is because I feel like the overall passion for the OS one uses has vastly declined in the last few years.

I know the current trend is to use electron based web apps and universal solutions with a single codebase, but I honestly hate using these solutions. One of the things I see a lot of Windows people try to do on MacOS is use the mouse for everything when as a UNIX-based OS, it's actually easier to use the keyboard for most things.

Try using the keyboard for navigation on an app like Discord. You can't. Not easily. And it forces me to constantly switch between the keyboard and the mouse. It's annoying when an app doesn't follow the conventions of the desktop environment you use.