Apple killed my interest in ARM and Macs

[Gudi]

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.

If only there was some kind of Rosetta 2 to handle all your legacy software needs. 🤔

1. Everything else on the planet is trying to make the transition from x86 to ARM with limited success.

2. I found the opposite to be true. M-series Macs provide tremendous performance for little money, but I’m also not buying a MacBook Pro + Studio Display + iPad Pro. That’s a very expensive setup you chose.

3. We’re all very grateful to the people who buy the RAM and SSD upgrades and finance the innovations we all enjoy. Whether you actually needed or wanted them is something only you can answer.

4. True, everything with a battery inside comes with an ownership risk. That’s why you don’t buy an All-in-One MacBook, but an iMac with an external power supply. 😂

5. I never called them or expect them to know how to solve a computer problem. That’s what Doctor Google is for.

6. You do understand that you don’t have to upgrade macOS on a crucial work computer? At least not right away before all the bugs are sorted.

7. Next easy to solve problem. Don’t buy/use iCloud for everything. Chose a cheaper cloud storage provider for all your photos and data.

Anyway so the MBP M1 Pro's D key on the keyboard gave up after 18 months.

Have you looked on YouTube on how to remove/reassemble and clean a key cap yourself?

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 ****.

I’m definitely questioning the sanity of iPhone Pro owners. Do they really need it to shoot Hollywood grade movies? It’s not envy, just incomprehensible life choices.

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

My condolences to your wallet. 💐

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.

And congratulations to whomever gets you Apple stuff at a nice second-hand discount. 😊

 

[Tyler O'Bannon]

Dang, well, they’ve piqued mine. I think this lineup is killer and it’s only going up from here.

 

[Gudi]

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.

So you’re still lamenting the 2010 introduction of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Core2Duo? Which for $200 more than the white polycarbonate MacBook only offered an aluminum unibody enclosure, backlit keyboard and more ports. Some people want and need only the form factor of a Pro computer.

 

[rodjam]

I am somewhat sympathetic to the OP but the problem is all of the other choices are far worse. A computer is simply a tool; choosing the best computing platform for your needs in the present and future can be clouded by emotion.

The OP needs among other things a computer algebra system, and chooses to use Maxima (formerly Macsyma) which is quite old and brittle, written in LISP and uses TCL/TK for its GUI. A macOS update apparently broke something in the Maxima stack, which seemed to precipitate changing platforms. There were other choices. Maxima is open source, get the source code and fix the problem is one. Another is switch to a supported computer algebra system such as Mathematica and pay for a perpetual license instead of buying all new hardware. Or one could switch to Sage math (which is basically a python front end to nearly every open source math package).

But OP made a choice to switch platforms and that is fine and I respect that. I think the bigger question here is: what is the best platform in the present for various tasks, and going forward what will be the best platform(s) in the future? Energy efficiency is important now, and I think will be increasingly important in the future, and for that reason alone it seems x86 is doomed, which is the main reason why ARM and perhaps RISC-V are probably where the future lies. Even Microsoft sees this. Unfortunately for Intel, their CEO is too delusional to figure this out until it is probably too late.

 

[seek3r]

The reason you see so many MacBooks at tech conferences is the physical hardware is hard to beat for laptops (battery life, form factor, display, trackpad quality, etc). It's also a requirement for Xcode, so any iOS/macOS dev work requires them anyways. I don't think they're bringing them to have their dev tools to work on code in the middle of a conference.

I'm in the engineering field so macOS is out of the question (most of the software we use isn't available on it). The software/web companies around here are about a 80/20 split of PC/Mac laptops, nearly 100% PC desktops (yes some still use desktops!), but in both cases almost all the dev work is done in Linux VMs. Of course any of the devs working on software for Apple products will be doing so in macOS since there is no other way.

The tech conferences I’m at rarely include anyone doing ios work, not a typical focus of DevOps and cloud work, and very much not a focus on the HPC side when I was there. And they do typically include

* workshops, for which you definitely need your dev tools
* demos and technical discussion and work with vendors, both new and established relationships, which has often required my dev tools.
* a weeklong conference where people are also trying to get work done (including me). You really dont think people work during conferences? Lol dude, come to re:invent in a couple weeks, I’ll be there, everyone there pretty much will spend time working, you’re there for a week, plenty of empty times to get work done, or collab with coworkers who also be there. Also a lot of us will be working on the plane for that matter

Also at both my current and past couple employers nearly my entire team has worked on macs, including in HPC (that would be literal supercomputing). Hell I worked at IBM when Macs were introduced, the adoption was huge and IT couldnt keep up with demand from managers for their teams

 

[DCohen726]

I’m on the reverse side of things. Yes, OP makes great points that I won’t argue. But to me it seems like for every misstep Apple makes, Microsoft decides to take 10 missteps with the windows software.

I’m lucky enough that I haven’t needed much support from Apple since I first got a Mac in 2016. But I agree they are priced out, things easily can break with new OS updates, and they have zero repairability. And it’s clear they have the means to fix this.

But then on the other end Microsoft keeps changing Windows by deprecating features with every minor update. Things break over there too. Windows have become a point where I ONLY have it for games, nothing else. A perfect example as just when Windows 10 was widely adopted, accepted, welcomed.. they rolled out Windows 11 and changed things nobody asked to be changed

 

[seek3r]

Yeah I tried those. But I already have one wobbly USB-C connector (the host port) on the studio display from just having the mac plugged into it. The connector shells are not robust enough to have a keyboard or mouse tugging on it all the time for sure.

This is mostly a criticism of USB-C but to have it at a stupid rear facing angle like that is just bad engineering.

The Dell that replaced it has all the connectors pointing downwards and passed through the stand as strain relief against tugging.

My LG display and my Hisense TV both have rear facing ports too, I use 90 degree adapters from amazon to let them sit flat against the wall, you can do the same, you’re nitpicking on something that’s not an Apple thing

 

[Richdmoore]

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.

 

[seek3r]

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.

I dont think the resistance to bootcamp is coming from Apple but from Qualcomm’s exclusivity deal with Microsoft, we can already run Linux natively on AS Macs, Apple isnt standing in the way of third party OSes, even if they arent supplying more than occasional bug fixes prompted by findings from the Asahi folks. I dont think they would object to redoing the drivers etc for windows, in fact I’d bet $100 right now that there’s an implementation of everything for bootcamp w windows in Apple’s labs, showing off Windows running on the speediest consumer ARM proc out there would be a big coup for Apple, this seems to be more Microsoft

And for now VMing Windows works pretty well too

 

[MarkNewton2023]

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.

Excellent write-ups. Understand your points and frustration. Apple products are just not for you at this time. Wish all happiness and the best of finding the right systems. 😊Keep calm and be happy 😊 Life is too short for any unhappiness😊

 

[AgentElliot007]

Great post, too spot on. If I was open to Android at this point I’d probably be gone from Apple. So true on all points. The amount of time I have to spend dealing with Apple support lately on the simplest of things and how little resolution is found is mind-blowing relative to how things used to be. The Apple experience has gone completely down the drain. I use both Windows and Mac everyday; one generally “just works” these days and the other that is marked as such, does not. Tim Cook may know how to run the hardware side of the business, but he’s allowed the software side to completely dissolve into an utterly miserable experience. I am so close to giving up after a life more or less on Apple. First computer I learned to use in the 80s as a kid was an Apple II, then the first Macintosh’s. First college laptop that was my own was an old iBook. I’ve been in the Apple world literally my entire life, and I’ve never been more ready to leave. Very sad state of affairs.

 

[dmccloud]

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.

The OP likes to use hyperbole when attempting to bash Apple. His "concerns" about segmentation in regards to the M3 are laughable. With Apple Silicon, you have just four tiers of SoC: Mx, Mx Pro, Mx Max, Mx Ultra. That's significantly easier to understand as a consumer than the 87 SKUs making up Intel's 13th generation product matrix (26 different i7s, 14 variants of the i9, 33 i5s, and 14 i3s as of this morning). So is the OPs complaint regarding segmentation actually that the M3 is not complex enough?


If anything, Intel's segmentation of their CPU lineup has gotten worse with a strange combination of CPUs with and without integrated graphics, varying numbers of performance and efficiency cores, and whether or not the processor can be overclocked. Even their processor generations are somewhat of a punchline right now, with the 14th "generation" CPUs being 13th generation designs with minor spec bumps and perhaps a slight reduction in power requirements. That will only get worse when the next generation comes out and Intel changes their entire naming convention yet again.

 

[rodjam]

Great post, too spot on. If I was open to Android at this point I’d probably be gone from Apple. So true on all points. The amount of time I have to spend dealing with Apple support lately on the simplest of things and how little resolution is found is mind-blowing relative to how things used to be. The Apple experience has gone completely down the drain. I use both Windows and Mac everyday; one generally “just works” these days and the other that is marked as such, does not. Tim Cook may know how to run the hardware side of the business, but he’s allowed the software side to completely dissolve into an utterly miserable experience. I am so close to giving up after a life more or less on Apple. First computer I learned to use in the 80s as a kid was an Apple II, then the first Macintosh’s. First college laptop that was my own was an old iBook. I’ve been in the Apple world literally my entire life, and I’ve never been more ready to leave. Very sad state of affairs.

I agree Apple's software is a gigantic mess right now, and they seem to not care at all. They have the resources to fix this, but they seem to choose to ignore the problem and instead pour money into all sorts of distractions (entertainment) in search of the next big thing to keep the stock from cratering. They are captured by their market cap and are too blind to see that the software stack is falling apart. I get wanting to modernize everything; Obj-C is old but it works, but they could have just fixed Obj-C, moved to C++, adopted Rust or something, instead of going their own way with the mess that is Swift + SwiftUI right now.

 

[seek3r]

I agree Apple's software is a gigantic mess right now, and they seem to not care at all. They have the resources to fix this, but they seem to choose to ignore the problem and instead pour money into all sorts of distractions (entertainment) in search of the next big thing to keep the stock from cratering. They are captured by their market cap and are too blind to see that the software stack is falling apart. I get wanting to modernize everything; Obj-C is old but it works, but they could have just fixed Obj-C, moved to C++, adopted Rust or something, instead of going their own way with the mess that is Swift + SwiftUI right now.

That one is one of the first truly valid criticisms in this thread, and I think it’s NIH syndrome in action

 

[Gudi]

That one is one of the first truly valid criticisms in this thread, and I think it’s NIH syndrome in action

Do you think Apple could’ve rewritten an entire OS for Apple Silicon including their own Metal graphics language without control over its programming language? Even if there was a better language somewhere out-there, the ability to make quick changes to their development environment is actually beneficial and not just a bias.

 

[bobcomer]

bootcamp is coming from Apple but from Qualcomm’s exclusivity deal with Microsoft,

That expired.

 

[seek3r]

That expired.

You have a citation? I cant find anything saying that

 

[bobcomer]

You have a citation? I cant find anything saying that

I don't, so I take it back -- but I first heard it was expiring sometime in 2021, and Microsoft now allows licensing WIndows on Arm in an Apple VM, so I assumed it had expired.

It seems nothing has been officially announced one way or the other. (except for being about to run WoA on something else)

 

[rodjam]

Do you think Apple could’ve rewritten an entire OS for Apple Silicon including their own Metal graphics language without control over its programming language? Even if there was a better language somewhere out-there, the ability to make quick changes to their development environment is actually beneficial and not just a bias.

Metal is written in C. The Swift compiler is written in C++. The kernel is written in C.

 

[rodjam]

That one is one of the first truly valid criticisms in this thread, and I think it’s NIH syndrome in action

I think it’s actually worse than not invented here syndrome. They want lock-in; write all your stuff in Swift and you’ll be locked into Apple platforms. Also, it’s open source so people can contribute to Apple’s software stack FOR FREE and feel good about giving your time to a $2-3 trillion company.

 

[Gudi]

Metal is written in C. The Swift compiler is written in C++. The kernel is written in C.

But neither Metal nor Swift are C, they are proprietary, which means Apple can change how this code is translated to C.

 

[Gudi]

I think it’s actually worse than not invented here syndrome. They want lock-in; write all your stuff in Swift and you’ll be locked into Apple platforms.

Yes, but you're also locked into an innovative platform, which proved its flexibility by transitioning from PowerPC to Intel and from Intel to Apple Silicon. Program for C# and you're locked into the dead-end that is Windows. Any other language and you don't get a proper GUI at all.

The Most Popular Programming Languages
1. Python – 29.48% market share
2. Java – 17.18% market share
3. JavaScript – 9.14% market share
4. C# – 6.94% market share
5. PHP – 6.49% market share
6. C/C++ – 6.49% market share
7. R – 3.59% market share
8. TypeScript – 2.18% market share
9. Swift – 2.1% market share
10. Objective-C – 2.06% market share

 

[TechnoMonk]

2019 MBP was one of the worst laptops I ever owned. It was like working in airport with jets taking off, and it kept the room warm in winter. I usually upgrade every 5 years, but couldn’t wait to get rid off for a M1 Max 64 GB.
I don’t buy Apple workstations or desktops, my Linux/Windows workstation with AMD/ NVidia does its job. My last Mac desktop/workstation was a 2009 Mini and a 2012 Mac Pro.
It’s just a tool, I don’t get emotional with purchases. Buy what gets the job done.

 

[yellowhelicopter]

Well I bought the basic Mac Mini M1 an year and half ago for less than 500$ and I think it was one of the best purchases I've even done, cost/effectiveness still high. But I do agree that for Pro/Mac models that cost 1000$+ it's already not that simple.

 

[Elon69]

ARM on windows sucks 100 times more