This point about features versus optimization is key. Snow Leopard is widely regarded as one of, if not the best, macOS update ever. It had zero new user-facing features; it was all about...
This point about features versus optimization is key. Snow Leopard is widely regarded as one of, if not the best, macOS update ever. It had zero new user-facing features; it was all about optimization under the hood. I would love to see Apple take more time to do that kind of work.
At this point it feels like their hardware is well ahead of their software. For example, Apple silicon is heavily optimized to eke out every bit of performance while maintaining long battery life.
The iPad in particular suffers from software that severely underserves its hardware.
Unfortunately for the iPad, it doesn't seem to have any good competition that nails both hardware and software. The iPad Pro's main competitors are the Samsung Galaxy Tab S-series, the Huawei...
Unfortunately for the iPad, it doesn't seem to have any good competition that nails both hardware and software. The iPad Pro's main competitors are the Samsung Galaxy Tab S-series, the Huawei MatePad Pro, Xiaomi Pad Pro and maybe a few others. I switched from an iPad Pro to a Galaxy Tab S9+ and while the hardware is beautiful, Samsung's software is meh at best. Samsung have struggled with software for forever and their situation doesn't seem to be getting better. They've had to delay their latest Android skin version to iron out some bugs and in all their discussions about the skin, they haven't mentioned once what it'd look like on tablets, watches, etc which doesn't inspire confidence.
The Chinese tablets seem to be super competitive as they have great hardware and apparently have great software but that also seems to be only limited to China. Chinese OEMs have a different build of their software for global markets which lacks some polish and are also slow to get updated.
The iPad does have some healthy competition in the $300-600USD price range but again software is a bit hit-or-miss.
It’s hard to compete when your competition has 90% of the market share and trillions in valuation. On top of that, they have proven over the decades they aren’t likely to fail from the hubris that...
It’s hard to compete when your competition has 90% of the market share and trillions in valuation. On top of that, they have proven over the decades they aren’t likely to fail from the hubris that caught IBM, Intel, and other market leaders.
Haven’t tried any Chinese tablets, but I do have a Galaxy S8+ that’s mainly used for dev purposes and the rare odd tablet task my iPad isn’t well suited for. The best thing about Samsung tablet...
Haven’t tried any Chinese tablets, but I do have a Galaxy S8+ that’s mainly used for dev purposes and the rare odd tablet task my iPad isn’t well suited for.
The best thing about Samsung tablet software is DeX, which has everything that Stage Manager on iPad is missing for pseudo-laptop/docked use. Unfortunately, iPadOS also has everything that DeX is missing, namely apps that actually do something with all that extra screen — overwhelmingly Android apps just treat large screens like giant phones. iPad apps much more consistently have proper tablet modes that in Stage Manager are almost Mac apps. So they’re both bad laptop/desktop replacements for different reasons.
The frustrating thing is, despite Apple’s software having been in decline for some time now, alternatives have as many or more problems, often to greater degrees of severity. Using Windows in...
The frustrating thing is, despite Apple’s software having been in decline for some time now, alternatives have as many or more problems, often to greater degrees of severity.
Using Windows in particular is a constant battle of turning off crap you never asked for, and after all that still having random agents in the background keeping CPU cores spun up and radios awake doing something or another. This isn’t all that noticeable on beefy desktop towers, but really sucks on laptops, particularly with how efficiency-challenged x86 CPUs tend to be.
Linux is monstrously better from the perspective of user control and letting your machine reach an actual idle state, but the desktop experience there is still eaten up with papercuts despite vast improvement over the years. So instead of your time getting sucked up turning off services, it’s instead doing things like endlessly tweaking GNOME/KDE/etc to try to get them to match your preferences, fixing oddball bugs with audio/wireless chipsets, and trying to squeeze out some extra battery life wherever possible.
On the mobile side of things, at least Android is a reasonably capable iOS alternative in the phone world, but there one has to deal with the handset manufacturer considered good/good value/etc shifting around from generation to generation and the inconsistencies resulting from manufacturer OS tweaks. Fit and finish in apps is generally worse, too. Android tablets on the other hand are basically just Samsung and cheap Youtube slabs, with the rest of industry basically having given up on trying to compete with iPads.
Though I’m primarily an Apple ecosystem user, I like to try to keep it mixed up to some extent so my ability to use other platforms doesn’t atrophy, plus sometimes it can be useful to have a machine that’s just totally disconnected from the rest (great for laptops dedicated to studying, for example). I’ve been running into some of the aforementioned frustrations recently when shopping for small Linux-capable laptops with good battery life — they all come with one or multiple major caveats and asterisks that make me just want to give up and buy a MacBook Air.
For what it's worth, I recently built a SFF PC. I'm running Windows 11 (mainly gaming+dev) and now very commonly show 0-1% CPU usage while idle. It does take power-user knowledge levels, and...
For what it's worth, I recently built a SFF PC. I'm running Windows 11 (mainly gaming+dev) and now very commonly show 0-1% CPU usage while idle.
It does take power-user knowledge levels, and you're right that you never know what an update could change or enable. For me, it's about the same or slightly less effort than maintaining an updated Linux box.
Either way, Apple software historically had better usability and default options that just made more sense. I hacked Snow Leopard into a netbook, and the biggest hurdle after install was launching apps with 80% magnification by default.
Hopefully they can spend some dev effort on stability and maximizing the potential hardware benefits.
My wife has recently started using Zorin, which has definitely been a fairly seamless experience (watching from the sidelines). With the caveat that this is on a business Thinkpad with AMD, so...
For me, it's about the same or slightly less effort than maintaining an updated Linux box.
My wife has recently started using Zorin, which has definitely been a fairly seamless experience (watching from the sidelines). With the caveat that this is on a business Thinkpad with AMD, so driver issues are nonexistent.
While I somewhat dislike them rebranding stuff like KDE Connect, it does simplify the experience for someone who isn't familiar with the ecosystem.
iGPU-only ThinkPads with Intel tend to be pretty good under Linux too. In my experience it’s discrete NVIDIA GPUs and treading outside of ThinkPads where things get more iffy. A lot of laptop...
iGPU-only ThinkPads with Intel tend to be pretty good under Linux too. In my experience it’s discrete NVIDIA GPUs and treading outside of ThinkPads where things get more iffy. A lot of laptop companies cheap out on dodgy Realtek chipsets for various things that perform badly even under Windows and are that much worse under Linux. Some laptops need manu-specific hacks to run Linux well too… ASUS laptops seem to be bad about that for instance.
I hackintoshed too back in the Leopard through High Sierra era. First for others (a custom built tower for brother and then later a Dell netbook for college classmate) and then later myself (a...
Either way, Apple software historically had better usability and default options that just made more sense. I hacked Snow Leopard into a netbook, and the biggest hurdle after install was launching apps with 80% magnification by default.
I hackintoshed too back in the Leopard through High Sierra era. First for others (a custom built tower for brother and then later a Dell netbook for college classmate) and then later myself (a late C2D Dell workstation laptop followed by a 6700k build).
Getting those up and running was a challenge sometimes, but once you did were just as much or more “set it and forget it” than real Macs were. That Dell laptop of mine was actually more stable under Mavericks than under Win7 or Linux (both of which struggled to power manage the GPU correctly) which is crazy and doesn’t even seem possible given the hacky, wholly unsupported nature of the setup.
I don't see how this is a papercut specifically for Linux. You can endlessly customize Windows too if you really want to, but you're in no way obligated to.
So instead of your time getting sucked up turning off services, it’s instead doing things like endlessly tweaking GNOME/KDE/etc to try to get them to match your preferences
I don't see how this is a papercut specifically for Linux. You can endlessly customize Windows too if you really want to, but you're in no way obligated to.
That’s true, but I feel much less of a need to do so under commercial OSes. Windows has degraded in this aspect with 11 but macOS especially I can have in a state usable for long stretches of work...
That’s true, but I feel much less of a need to do so under commercial OSes. Windows has degraded in this aspect with 11 but macOS especially I can have in a state usable for long stretches of work in 30m or less without tricks like dotfile repos. With Linux DEs I feel much more compelled to fix the numerous small rough spots.
I've been an Apple user long enough to really really miss when they stood by "It just works". Now, their products are more often "It just work [except for random crashes/beachballs or when you...
I've been an Apple user long enough to really really miss when they stood by "It just works".
Now, their products are more often "It just work [except for random crashes/beachballs or when you need to restart mobile Safari because websites just aren't loading]". 🙄
Haha yeah, Macs in the 90s weren't always great. They were better than most of the alternatives, often significantly, though, so I think that's where some of the rose colored glasses come from?
Haha yeah, Macs in the 90s weren't always great. They were better than most of the alternatives, often significantly, though, so I think that's where some of the rose colored glasses come from?
The saving grace of classic Mac OS in my opinion was just how incredibly lightweight it was, especially toward the end of its life. Where Windows had become a trudging behemoth relative to the...
The saving grace of classic Mac OS in my opinion was just how incredibly lightweight it was, especially toward the end of its life. Where Windows had become a trudging behemoth relative to the earliest Windows releases by 2000, Mac OS 9 was barely more heavy than System 7.5 was in the early 90s, and with much of its functionality being implemented in extensions instead of as part of the OS itself, one could trim back the OS to reduce its resource consumption down to a third or less, depending on which extensions were turned off. This made the G3 and G4 Macs of the era feel incredibly snappy (even now, my 400mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 feels more responsive than modern NVMe SSD equipped computers running barebones Linux distros) and let you dedicate nearly your all your resources to whatever resource intense thing you might be doing (which in my case was running games and emulators).
Its stability definitely left something to be desired but that lightweight flexible nature was something special. Not even Linux can reach those heights, at least not without having to configure and build a custom kernel.
This point about features versus optimization is key. Snow Leopard is widely regarded as one of, if not the best, macOS update ever. It had zero new user-facing features; it was all about optimization under the hood. I would love to see Apple take more time to do that kind of work.
At this point it feels like their hardware is well ahead of their software. For example, Apple silicon is heavily optimized to eke out every bit of performance while maintaining long battery life.
The iPad in particular suffers from software that severely underserves its hardware.
Unfortunately for the iPad, it doesn't seem to have any good competition that nails both hardware and software. The iPad Pro's main competitors are the Samsung Galaxy Tab S-series, the Huawei MatePad Pro, Xiaomi Pad Pro and maybe a few others. I switched from an iPad Pro to a Galaxy Tab S9+ and while the hardware is beautiful, Samsung's software is meh at best. Samsung have struggled with software for forever and their situation doesn't seem to be getting better. They've had to delay their latest Android skin version to iron out some bugs and in all their discussions about the skin, they haven't mentioned once what it'd look like on tablets, watches, etc which doesn't inspire confidence.
The Chinese tablets seem to be super competitive as they have great hardware and apparently have great software but that also seems to be only limited to China. Chinese OEMs have a different build of their software for global markets which lacks some polish and are also slow to get updated.
The iPad does have some healthy competition in the $300-600USD price range but again software is a bit hit-or-miss.
It’s hard to compete when your competition has 90% of the market share and trillions in valuation. On top of that, they have proven over the decades they aren’t likely to fail from the hubris that caught IBM, Intel, and other market leaders.
Haven’t tried any Chinese tablets, but I do have a Galaxy S8+ that’s mainly used for dev purposes and the rare odd tablet task my iPad isn’t well suited for.
The best thing about Samsung tablet software is DeX, which has everything that Stage Manager on iPad is missing for pseudo-laptop/docked use. Unfortunately, iPadOS also has everything that DeX is missing, namely apps that actually do something with all that extra screen — overwhelmingly Android apps just treat large screens like giant phones. iPad apps much more consistently have proper tablet modes that in Stage Manager are almost Mac apps. So they’re both bad laptop/desktop replacements for different reasons.
The frustrating thing is, despite Apple’s software having been in decline for some time now, alternatives have as many or more problems, often to greater degrees of severity.
Using Windows in particular is a constant battle of turning off crap you never asked for, and after all that still having random agents in the background keeping CPU cores spun up and radios awake doing something or another. This isn’t all that noticeable on beefy desktop towers, but really sucks on laptops, particularly with how efficiency-challenged x86 CPUs tend to be.
Linux is monstrously better from the perspective of user control and letting your machine reach an actual idle state, but the desktop experience there is still eaten up with papercuts despite vast improvement over the years. So instead of your time getting sucked up turning off services, it’s instead doing things like endlessly tweaking GNOME/KDE/etc to try to get them to match your preferences, fixing oddball bugs with audio/wireless chipsets, and trying to squeeze out some extra battery life wherever possible.
On the mobile side of things, at least Android is a reasonably capable iOS alternative in the phone world, but there one has to deal with the handset manufacturer considered good/good value/etc shifting around from generation to generation and the inconsistencies resulting from manufacturer OS tweaks. Fit and finish in apps is generally worse, too. Android tablets on the other hand are basically just Samsung and cheap Youtube slabs, with the rest of industry basically having given up on trying to compete with iPads.
Though I’m primarily an Apple ecosystem user, I like to try to keep it mixed up to some extent so my ability to use other platforms doesn’t atrophy, plus sometimes it can be useful to have a machine that’s just totally disconnected from the rest (great for laptops dedicated to studying, for example). I’ve been running into some of the aforementioned frustrations recently when shopping for small Linux-capable laptops with good battery life — they all come with one or multiple major caveats and asterisks that make me just want to give up and buy a MacBook Air.
For what it's worth, I recently built a SFF PC. I'm running Windows 11 (mainly gaming+dev) and now very commonly show 0-1% CPU usage while idle.
It does take power-user knowledge levels, and you're right that you never know what an update could change or enable. For me, it's about the same or slightly less effort than maintaining an updated Linux box.
Either way, Apple software historically had better usability and default options that just made more sense. I hacked Snow Leopard into a netbook, and the biggest hurdle after install was launching apps with 80% magnification by default.
Hopefully they can spend some dev effort on stability and maximizing the potential hardware benefits.
My wife has recently started using Zorin, which has definitely been a fairly seamless experience (watching from the sidelines). With the caveat that this is on a business Thinkpad with AMD, so driver issues are nonexistent.
While I somewhat dislike them rebranding stuff like KDE Connect, it does simplify the experience for someone who isn't familiar with the ecosystem.
iGPU-only ThinkPads with Intel tend to be pretty good under Linux too. In my experience it’s discrete NVIDIA GPUs and treading outside of ThinkPads where things get more iffy. A lot of laptop companies cheap out on dodgy Realtek chipsets for various things that perform badly even under Windows and are that much worse under Linux. Some laptops need manu-specific hacks to run Linux well too… ASUS laptops seem to be bad about that for instance.
I hackintoshed too back in the Leopard through High Sierra era. First for others (a custom built tower for brother and then later a Dell netbook for college classmate) and then later myself (a late C2D Dell workstation laptop followed by a 6700k build).
Getting those up and running was a challenge sometimes, but once you did were just as much or more “set it and forget it” than real Macs were. That Dell laptop of mine was actually more stable under Mavericks than under Win7 or Linux (both of which struggled to power manage the GPU correctly) which is crazy and doesn’t even seem possible given the hacky, wholly unsupported nature of the setup.
I don't see how this is a papercut specifically for Linux. You can endlessly customize Windows too if you really want to, but you're in no way obligated to.
That’s true, but I feel much less of a need to do so under commercial OSes. Windows has degraded in this aspect with 11 but macOS especially I can have in a state usable for long stretches of work in 30m or less without tricks like dotfile repos. With Linux DEs I feel much more compelled to fix the numerous small rough spots.
I've been an Apple user long enough to really really miss when they stood by "It just works".
Now, their products are more often "It just work [except for random crashes/beachballs or when you need to restart mobile Safari because websites just aren't loading]". 🙄
As someone who sometimes used Macs in the 90s, this is just a return to normalcy. 😜
Ouch
Haha yeah, Macs in the 90s weren't always great. They were better than most of the alternatives, often significantly, though, so I think that's where some of the rose colored glasses come from?
The saving grace of classic Mac OS in my opinion was just how incredibly lightweight it was, especially toward the end of its life. Where Windows had become a trudging behemoth relative to the earliest Windows releases by 2000, Mac OS 9 was barely more heavy than System 7.5 was in the early 90s, and with much of its functionality being implemented in extensions instead of as part of the OS itself, one could trim back the OS to reduce its resource consumption down to a third or less, depending on which extensions were turned off. This made the G3 and G4 Macs of the era feel incredibly snappy (even now, my 400mhz PowerBook G3 running OS 9 feels more responsive than modern NVMe SSD equipped computers running barebones Linux distros) and let you dedicate nearly your all your resources to whatever resource intense thing you might be doing (which in my case was running games and emulators).
Its stability definitely left something to be desired but that lightweight flexible nature was something special. Not even Linux can reach those heights, at least not without having to configure and build a custom kernel.