Apple killed my interest in ARM and Macs

[LambdaTheImpossible]

Long term Mac user here. I've had a Mac as a primary machine for 18 years, just switching over when they dropped Intel in there. I had a G3 blue Powermac before that but to be fair it didn't get used that much. My use cases are both professional and academic. From a professional perspective I need admin tooling for Linux machines. From an academic perspective I need mathematical tools and typesetting. From a personal perspective I need basic admin (spreadsheet, word processor) and Lightroom/Photoshop. And shared across I need time management stuff.

I was using an 14" M1 Pro / Studio Display combo as my workstation and portable machine with an iPad Pro as a portable machine.

Over the last year I've started to become very disenfranchised with the ecosystem for a number of reasons I will go into.

1. The M-series ARM processors were supposed to be a major technology jump and in fact they were on the first iteration. Since then things are starting to look a little less than what I hoped. The ecosystem remains pretty much closed. Despite the excellent reverse engineering efforts of many people getting quite far, any hope of retaining use of hardware after the supported OS is EOL'ed is looking unlikely. On top of that the disparity between nearly everything else on the planet being x86-64 is actually quite crippling. It brings a lot of overhead in when you consider things like docker and some commercial packages which have to unfortunately run under emulation. Whilst there are performance and power gains, the friction tends to kick you in the nuts in another way.
   
   
2. The pricing and upkeep costs are insane. The hardware is simply too expensive and the pricing isn't justified by the performance.
   
   
3. The segmentation and SKU breakdown of the M3 series is insane, as is the storage increments and the new "Pro" class machines that aren't Pro. It stinks of desperation and craziness.
   
   
4. The ownership risk is high. Despite some improvements on repair, the devices pretty much aren't what I'd call repairable by any reasonable standard. Sure you can swap ports out etc but battery replacements are extremely difficult and keyboard replacements mean replacing the entire top case assembly and battery via official paths. The one time I've had to execute on AppleCare, they didn't have an SKU in stock and I had to wait 2 weeks without a computer entirely. My only option was to buy another one (I'll get into that later).
   
   
5. The quality of support is declining. Every time I have to phone Apple support, it's a multi day round trip of phone calls passed around departments and broken systems in the background that people have to escalate and raise tickets to get sorted.
   
   
6. Every time there is a minor macOS release, something breaks. Maxima was the last thing that killed me and I ended up using a spare PC I have around for the kids to do work on. That just worked.
   
   
7. iCloud pricing. You get nothing decent for a lot of money. I'd rather give Microsoft the money for Office 365 which I have to buy anyway for Mac.

Anyway so the MBP M1 Pro's D key on the keyboard gave up after 18 months. It's a heavily used workstation. I expect better but I have AppleCare so off to Apple who, as it's a custom build, did not have a replacement or a repair capability. It was gone for two weeks. I ambled around the Apple Store and looked at the base price M2 Studio and the M2 Mini Pro and thought "I am not spending £1600-2000 to cover this". So I sat in a pizza place and scratched out some tradeoffs with a pen and paper.

Adding some experience I had doing some travelling this year with people eyeing up my iPhone 13 Pro uncomfortably because it's about 6 months' salary out there, I've got to say that I also feel a little dirty having all this ****. Also the 13 Pro is just out of AppleCare now so I now risk tanking it and having to pay to repair it or.

So I bought a whole load of PC bits and an Android phone.

1. A custom PC build. Intel i5-13500, Noctua cooler, 32Gb RAM, 1TB SN850X NVMe SSD, MSI B760 board, 850W Corsair power supply, Asus case, Asus RTX 4070 GPU, Dell 27" 4K monitor, Cherry keyboard and Logitech Mouse. That came to £1625, LESS than the 8Gb entry level MBP just announced and only fractionally more expensive than the M2 Pro Mini on its own. What the hell Apple?
   
   
2. A Lenovo ThinkPad T14 gen 3. Intel i7-1265U, 16Gb RAM, 1TB SSD. That came to £1027, considerably LESS than the 8Gb entry level MBP just announced. The battery sucks but you know what, meh, it's not that great on my M1 Pro when I'm doing actual work on it so I have to drag the charger around for that anyway. Also what the hell Apple?
   
   
3. A Google Pixel 7A. £449. This thing is better than my daughter's iPhone 14 and much cheaper. Actually get a 90Hz display and the battery lasts literally 2-3 days no problems at all. The camera sucks just the same as the one on a 13 Pro does. I use a mirrorless camera for anything I care about anyway. And thirdly, what the hell Apple?

All three things are in Apple's new Premium colour as well: black.

I'm in the process of getting all the remaining AppleCare refunded (each £300 in the bank between devices) and selling all the Apple crap.

At the end of the day, I get a workstation, a decent laptop and a phone and fully redundant hardware in case of failure and I'm up £1154 in cash which I will stuff in the bank. I can support this myself without having to deal with the vendor. And I can upgrade this if I need to without having to throw the whole thing away. And all the software I need actually works properly on it. And I get to retain my spare kidney.

Rant over.

Edit: I have a second set of problems I'll raise elsewhere in a few days on iOS ecosystem and what I consider to be the most abhorrently painful to use computer there is: The iPad Pro.

 

[leman]

One can't make everyone happy. If Apple does not satisfy your very specific set of requirements (like reliance on highly specific x86 software), then it is only wise to use some other tool. Especially if you don't need performance and are happy to sacrifice quality/ergonomy to save some money.

 

[Regulus67]

An interesting read.
I came from the PC side, so went in the opposite direction. And like you, I am very sceptical about the ARM hardware. Because the system is built into one unit, and not replaceable, or upgradeable.
Even the new 27" screen needs iOS software and updates. What happens when that is no longer supported by Apple?

But I am very happy with the x86-64 Apple hardware I chose. For the same reasons.

I am looking forward to your post on the iPad Pro. I have two M1. So I am curious as to what your opinion is.
I do not see it as a laptop replacement, and I do not want it to be. Even if I see people constantly complaining about it not being able to run MacOS.

 

[gpat]

No computing platform is perfect, but it really was the previous era that killed interest in Macs for me.
Mac Pro 2013 trashcan, 2015 Macbook, 2016 MBP, 2018 MBA, those were the actually dreadful products.
Apple could make some better decisions regarding the current products, but still every day I'm grateful for the end of the nightmare we had to endure before Apple Silicon.

 

[laptech]

I have no doubt much to the likes of the dear departed Steve Jobs and the current CEO Tim Cook, both of them would like the world to run on Apple computers but unfortunately for them it doesn't and therefore people whether in their personal life or professional life will require the use of a windows program and this is where the boot camp capabilities of Intel mac's were a god send for those that required the use of windows programs during their personal and professional life.

These new ARM mac machines do not officially support boot camping windows even though I believe there are 3rd party attempts to try to do so. I think emulation is the only way at the moment but it has performance draw backs which can be bad for those who need to use some windows programs in their professional life.

Tim Cook and Apple needs to understand Windows is here to stay and as soon as they provide a boot camp version of Windows for their ARM mac's, there will be many people who will stay away from ARM mac's.

 

[Kristain]

Every time there is a minor macOS release, something breaks. Maxima was the last thing that killed me and I ended up using a spare PC I have around for the kids to do work on. That just worked.

This is certainly true and I really don't understand why. For example, the Neural Engine bugs introduced into Ventura and stopping Adobe, DXO and other software working properly still haven't been fixed over a year on. It's just completely inexcusable that basic hardware functionality you pay for can't be used due to OS bugs that never get fixed.

 

[Regulus67]

Mac Pro 2013 trashcan, 2015 Macbook, 2016 MBP, 2018 MBA, those were the actually dreadful products.

I wonder, what is the real difference between the Mac Pro 6.1, and the Mac Studio? Seems to me they have basically the same issue. But at least you could upgrade the former, to some degree.
Or do you like the Mac Studio better because you can purchase the next version that has new and better hardware?

 

[mr_roboto]

Despite the excellent reverse engineering efforts of many people getting quite far, any hope of retaining use of hardware after the supported OS is EOL'ed is looking unlikely.

It's amazing that you acknowledge there's excellent reverse engineering efforts, then immediately pretend they don't exist. The way things are shaping up, old Apple Silicon Macs which Apple has stopped providing OS updates for will be able to run current Linux, just as was always true with x86 Macs. In fact, Linux support for these Macs might end up being higher quality than Linux on x86 Macs was (particularly late-model x86 Macs).

The pricing and upkeep costs are insane. The hardware is simply too expensive and the pricing isn't justified by the performance.

This is an insane thing to complain about as Apple's pricing hasn't changed much with Apple Silicon. Sometimes, as with the Mac Pro, it's actually much cheaper. (Maybe things are different in the UK due to fluctuations in GBP to USD exchange rates? Y'all did leave the EU shortly before Apple Silicon Macs launched, and as I understand it, the GBP has subsequently taken quite a nosedive in value.)

The segmentation and SKU breakdown of the M3 series is insane, as is the storage increments and the new "Pro" class machines that aren't Pro. It stinks of desperation and craziness.

What precisely is "desperate" or "insane" about it? Be specific, and I'm especially interested in hearing how your complaints about high prices can be reconciled with declaring that Apple's desperate. If they were struggling to sell Apple Silicon Macs, they'd slash prices, not keep them mostly where they were at before the transition.

With respect to segmentation and increments, once again, nothing's really changed here. 8/256 was the minimum RAM/SSD config before the transition, and continues to be after.

In areas other than RAM and SSD, there's actually far less segmentation since many of the bewildering array of tradeoffs inherent in Intel's overcomplicated SKU lineup (even with Apple filtering most of it out) are gone. For example, Intel loves to segment based on frequency, and that got passed on to the customer when Apple was using Intel - you'd have lots of CPU clock speed options in any Mac. Now, with Apple Silicon, clock speed is extremely flat. The cheapest Mac, the $599 M2 Mac Mini, has essentially the same single thread performance as the biggest and most expensive M2 Ultra machines.

I think the real takeaway here is that you feel Apple doesn't provide good value for money for the things you do, but you've misattributed a lot of it to the ARM transition when really most of the things you complain about have nothing to do with ARM and have been true for essentially forever. It's a bit mystifying that you never noticed, in 18 years of Mac ownership, that Apple sells things for high prices.

 

[gpat]

I wonder, what is the real difference between the Mac Pro 6.1, and the Mac Studio? Seems to me they have basically the same issue. But at least you could upgrade the former, to some degree.
Or do you like the Mac Studio better because you can purchase the next version that has new and better hardware?

Answer is easy. Computers are bought mainly for their performance per $ (or € in my case).
2013 Mac Pro had dreadful performance per $. Mac Studio at least makes some sense.
And the whole system is so streamlined that you can just resell it if you need better CPU or RAM.

 

[gpat]

Now, with Apple Silicon, clock speed is extremely flat. The cheapest Mac, the $599 M2 Mac Mini, has essentially the same single thread performance as the biggest and most expensive M2 Ultra machines.

It's a design choice.
We are not in 2005 anymore, a computer is not judged mainly by singlethreaded performance.
High single core performance makes sense for casual users because their productivity and navigation will be uber-snappy.
Heavy workflows are always parallelized, so it makes sense to increase cores for professionals.

 

[Regulus67]

2013 Mac Pro had dreadful performance per $. Mac Studio at least makes some sense.
And the whole system is so streamlined that you can just resell it if you need better CPU or RAM.

If you only take Apple's sale price into account, that is true.
But there is a but here.
You could purchase used or new 3-party parts for a lot less $.

I did that myself, on my Mac Pro 2019. It came with 32GB RAM. I upgraded to 192GB for €456 through e-bay this summer. Apple still charges almost €3800 for that. The memory alone cost as much as I paid for my Mac Pro this year, with 16-cores, 32GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and Vega II graphic card.
And I purchased my Mac Pro while Apple still sold it in the Mac store.
Try that with Apple Silicon Macs

 

[the future]

Hyperbole is never very convincing when trying to make a point, and the OP is full of hyperbole. A lot of it just wrong, too (or at least highly subjective). Even the poster himself called it a „rant“.

Also, please link to the follow-up rant on the equivalent PC forum. I’m sure you’ll find lots of stuff on the Windows side of the fence to be angry about, too.

 

[gpat]

If you only take Apple's sale price into account, that is true.
But there is a but here.
You could purchase used or new 3-party parts for a lot less $.

I did that myself, on my Mac Pro 2019. It came with 32GB RAM. I upgraded to 192GB for €456 through e-bay this summer. Apple still charges almost €3800 for that. The memory alone cost as much as I paid for my Mac Pro this year, with 16-cores, 32GB RAM, 1 TB SSD and Vega II graphic card.
And I purchased my Mac Pro while Apple still sold it in the Mac store.
Try that with Apple Silicon Macs

Talking about Mac Pro 2019 means that you throw out of the window any value proposition.
It was massively overpriced to start with.

You should not compare GBs and GHZs but rather performance output in your workflows.
That's the big catch in upgrading desktop computers, you can go up to a point, but then your motherboard and CPUs are obsoleted and your upgrade path hits against a wall.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

It's amazing that you acknowledge there's excellent reverse engineering efforts, then immediately pretend they don't exist. The way things are shaping up, old Apple Silicon Macs which Apple has stopped providing OS updates for will be able to run current Linux, just as was always true with x86 Macs. In fact, Linux support for these Macs might end up being higher quality than Linux on x86 Macs was (particularly late-model x86 Macs).

I think you're overstating the progress a little bit there. Fundamental parts of the devices are not supported and the architecture is a very heavy moving target. I am in no way denigrating their efforts but as a complete realist, and someone who has actually written kernel drivers for stuff that we do have the documentation for, it's going to be a lot more difficult to keep the platform stable. I mean recently they discovered a bunch of problems with GPU drivers which crash if you have a specific configuration on MBP where ProMotion is turned off. There are a million small edge cases which make this a difficult target to hit. Linux, on the desktop, is bad enough as it is with the problems FreeDesktop and RH stewardship have caused over the last decade. Everything is 80% finished only which is not good enough. Ergo, this is not likely to be an every day solution.

This is an insane thing to complain about as Apple's pricing hasn't changed much with Apple Silicon. Sometimes, as with the Mac Pro, it's actually much cheaper. (Maybe things are different in the UK due to fluctuations in GBP to USD exchange rates? Y'all did leave the EU shortly before Apple Silicon Macs launched, and as I understand it, the GBP has subsequently taken quite a nosedive in value.)

Pricing is relative though. For example the exchange rate also affects the PC pricing here which is quite volatile but ridiculously lower pricing than the equivalent Apple parts.

What precisely is "desperate" or "insane" about it? Be specific, and I'm especially interested in hearing how your complaints about high prices can be reconciled with declaring that Apple's desperate. If they were struggling to sell Apple Silicon Macs, they'd slash prices, not keep them mostly where they were at before the transition.

Well quite frankly the amount of SKUs and the pollution of the "Pro" line with base model processors makes it a complete minefield to navigate to what might be considered a decent, usable computer with some longevity in it.

I mean a "Pro" class machine with 8GB of RAM, 256Gb of storage in 2023 is simply an insult even if it is consolidation of lines.

And please don't give me the 8GB works differently on macOS because it really doesn't when you throw professional workloads at it like Lightroom and Photoshop. The machines rapidly crap out.

With respect to segmentation and increments, once again, nothing's really changed here. 8/256 was the minimum RAM/SSD config before the transition, and continues to be after.

Which is stupid in 2023. My ThinkPad cost roughly LESS than the bottom end M2 MBA here and comes with 16Gb and 1TB. The 16Gb can be upgraded to 32Gb for virtually nothing and the 1TB SSD is a standard removable WD NVMe one that does 5000MB/sec read out of the box.

In areas other than RAM and SSD, there's actually far less segmentation since many of the bewildering array of tradeoffs inherent in Intel's overcomplicated SKU lineup (even with Apple filtering most of it out) are gone. For example, Intel loves to segment based on frequency, and that got passed on to the customer when Apple was using Intel - you'd have lots of CPU clock speed options in any Mac. Now, with Apple Silicon, clock speed is extremely flat. The cheapest Mac, the $599 M2 Mac Mini, has essentially the same single thread performance as the biggest and most expensive M2 Ultra machines.

Intels segmentation is easy ... generation (12/13/14) / core count (i3/i5/i7/i9) / clock. That is it.

The single thread performance point is slightly corrupted there. The P/E core division ratio on M-cores is a minefield now and they don't even specify how many of each you get on the product pages any more. I know my i5-13500 has 6x P-cores and 8x E-cores.

I think the real takeaway here is that you feel Apple doesn't provide good value for money for the things you do, but you've misattributed a lot of it to the ARM transition when really most of the things you complain about have nothing to do with ARM and have been true for essentially forever. It's a bit mystifying that you never noticed, in 18 years of Mac ownership, that Apple sells things for high prices.

I attribute it to exactly what it is: confusion and chaos for an unfair price.

 

[leman]

I think the real takeaway here is that you feel Apple doesn't provide good value for money for the things you do, but you've misattributed a lot of it to the ARM transition when really most of the things you complain about have nothing to do with ARM and have been true for essentially forever. It's a bit mystifying that you never noticed, in 18 years of Mac ownership, that Apple sells things for high prices.

Right? The prices are the same, but the value proposition has increased tremendously.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

Hyperbole is never very convincing when trying to make a point, and the OP is full of hyperbole. A lot of it just wrong, too (or at least highly subjective). Even the poster himself called it a „rant“.

Also, please link to the follow-up rant on the equivalent PC forum. I’m sure you’ll find lots of stuff on the Windows side of the fence to be angry about, too.

Hyperbole is not to be taken literally.

This is a very literal discussion.

And I'm certainly not saying PCs don't have problems. They have different ones. But I certainly don't feel like there are more of them on that side of the fence.

As for the comments about me being wrong, please feel free to be specific.

 

[altaic]

@sunny5 comes to the rescue! This thread is already a SS, so how can you lose!

 

[jclardy]

I still use both Windows/Mac/Linux, but live on my MBP for the most part. If you want just raw power, sure, go intel/amd/nvidia. But I'll tell you, side by side, my MBP (M1 Max) vs my 2023 Asus Zephyrus G14 ($1600 laptop with R9/4060) - the speed is comparable, but the fans are absolutely abhorrent. My Asus when under any load - and I do mean any - just a few Chrome tabs will do it - it sounds like a 747 in my office and the chasis is still burning hot on the keyboard deck.

I do way more intensive work on my MBP (large Xcode projects) and I think I have maybe heard the fans once or twice if it is absolutely silent in the room.

Also - battery life - I've noticed the issue I have with the MBP is honestly just apps getting stuck processes at 100%. Because the computer is dead silent, it just silently drains the battery. I've watched out for this more recently and now my battery life is awesome. On Asus - the battery feels entirely random even meticulously adjusting power modes in Windows - and if you have a stuck process you will know it from the fans spinning up. And then there is windows sleep mode...I never know if my laptop will have battery when I close the lid and open it in a day or two - with my mac, no problem.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

One can't make everyone happy. If Apple does not satisfy your very specific set of requirements (like reliance on highly specific x86 software), then it is only wise to use some other tool. Especially if you don't need performance and are happy to sacrifice quality/ergonomy to save some money.

Well the point is my software is all platform portable. But it breaks on macOS on a semi regular basis. The same is not true for Windows.

The docker thing I work around by running a VM in AWS but that's an inconvenience I was willing to live with for the other gains. Turns out there weren't many

 

[leman]

Which is stupid in 2023. My ThinkPad cost roughly LESS than the bottom end M2 MBA here and comes with 16Gb and 1TB.

If you cherry pick, sure. Your Thinkpad's RAM is also 1/2 of speed of the M2 MBA, and its processor is almost two times slower as well (I am not even talking about the GPU). It also comes with a low-end display and a low-endurance SSD. The price differences are there for a reason.

 

[leman]

Well the point is my software is all platform portable. But it breaks on macOS on a semi regular basis.

I would attribute this to the developer putting less maintenance effort in the platform. There are macOS bugs, sure, but you'd be shocked how often developers rely on undocumented or deprecated features only later to blame Apple when their software stops working.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

If you cherry pick, sure. Your Thinkpad's RAM is also 1/2 of speed of the M2 MBA, and its processor is almost two times slower as well (I am not even talking about the GPU). It also comes with a low-end display and a low-endurance SSD. The price differences are there for a reason.

The display is a 400 nit IPS panel at 1920x1200 with 99% sRGB. Which is perfectly adequate for a portable computer.

The SSD is a WD SN770 with a quoted endurance of 1200TBW. Apple do not quote this and the SSD is not removable or replaceable.

As for synthetic benchmarks, meh. It takes only 5% less time to do the same Lightroom import and thumbnail generation as the M1 MBP in real life. That's my main CPU consumer. That's good and a real world metric.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

I would attribute this to the developer putting less maintenance effort in the platform. There are macOS bugs, sure, but you'd be shocked how often developers rely on undocumented or deprecated features only later to blame Apple when their software stops working.

The thing is built on top of Qt. Apple break Qt regularly with undocumented API changes and weirdness inside regularly. For example some VNA client software I use was stuck in a UI thread deadlock due to a bug in Cocoa after a minor update to macOS. That's an actual macOS bug. I submitted it with profiler traces. Still not fixed after 2 years.

Stuff I wrote back in 2002 in C++ on windows still runs now. Unchanged with no problems and no recompile.

 

[Shirasaki]

I still use both Windows/Mac/Linux, but live on my MBP for the most part. If you want just raw power, sure, go intel/amd/nvidia. But I'll tell you, side by side, my MBP (M1 Max) vs my 2023 Asus Zephyrus G14 ($1600 laptop with R9/4060) - the speed is comparable, but the fans are absolutely abhorrent. My Asus when under any load - and I do mean any - just a few Chrome tabs will do it - it sounds like a 747 in my office and the chasis is still burning hot on the keyboard deck.

I do way more intensive work on my MBP (large Xcode projects) and I think I have maybe heard the fans once or twice if it is absolutely silent in the room.

Also - battery life - I've noticed the issue I have with the MBP is honestly just apps getting stuck processes at 100%. Because the computer is dead silent, it just silently drains the battery. I've watched out for this more recently and now my battery life is awesome. On Asus - the battery feels entirely random even meticulously adjusting power modes in Windows - and if you have a stuck process you will know it from the fans spinning up. And then there is windows sleep mode...I never know if my laptop will have battery when I close the lid and open it in a day or two - with my mac, no problem.

Despite all that, Mac is a minority platform with specialised software support. Do I like my MacBooks battery life? Yes. Performance? Meh. Software support? Well it’s macOS so meh. Its fan rarely spins up. At the end of the day tho, most everything I need can only run on windows, same as OP.

Will macOS change to adapt to windows crowd more? Doubtful. Excellence on their own niche to the exclusion of everything else isn’t really a bad strategy either, not to mention platform portable software can ease the itch a little bit more. Am I going to give up on windows? No. But same can be said for macOS.

 

[Shirasaki]

I would attribute this to the developer putting less maintenance effort in the platform. There are macOS bugs, sure, but you'd be shocked how often developers rely on undocumented or deprecated features only later to blame Apple when their software stops working.

They rely on those probably because the feature they want is not supported by Apple with published API, and there is no alternative. This just put them between A rock and a hard place: heavy maintenance but more feature rich software vs limited software but light maintenance.