Apple killed my interest in ARM and Macs

[Allen_Wentz]

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.

Enjoy your Windroid world. I have been using Macs a lot longer than you did, and I am thrilled by Apple's current efforts. I look forward to seeing where Mac Pro and Studio Ultra go even though their power already far exceeds my (~M2 Max) needs.

 

[leman]

No, no changes would be required. Windows already runs on ARM. And in fact, Parallels already has virtualized Windows drivers. If Apple is REALLY lazy, they can just emulate a generic ARM processor and boot Windows based on this approach.

Which is exactly how they run windows virtual machines. This would be still loading Windows under a hypervisor. Will users accept this as native booting?

The biggest issue, at any rate, is drivers.

 

[Allen_Wentz]

Yeah for digital art, there is nothing better. I'll give you that.

But my purposes, which are academic note taking via GoodNotes, paper worked out to be better than the supposed gains of doing this electronically. I just dump the notepad sheets in my AIO printer/scanner tray and out pops a PDF.

Fundamentally apart from that it's a crap laptop which you have to buy a really expensive keyboard for and then put up with all the compromises on iOS to boot.

iPad Pro is really good tablet, not a "crap laptop;" your dissing is apparently just because you can. Folks (not me) who make it into a laptop have their own reasons for doing so I guess, because they keep doing it.

 

[Joe Dohn]

Which is exactly how they run windows virtual machines. This would be still loading Windows under a hypervisor. Will users accept this as native booting?

But the difference is that bootcamp with this method would be running on bare metal, so the performance wouldn't be 100% native, but it would be much loser (e.g, all CPU cores would be able to be used). And since it's Apple we're talking about, they can definitely design a custom method that is very performant.

The biggest issue, at any rate, is drivers.

I.e, the easiest to solve.

 

[leman]

But the difference is that bootcamp with this method would be running on bare metal, so the performance wouldn't be 100% native, but it would be much loser (e.g, all CPU cores would be able to be used). And since it's Apple we're talking about, they can definitely design a custom method that is very performant.




I.e, the easiest to solve.

None of these things are hard to solve. But they take a lot of effort, ongoing commitment, and possibly collaboration between the two companies to solve them. For example, I just don't see either Apple or Microsoft dedicating a team to writing and maintaining a full graphics driver stack (GL, DX9/11/12, Vulkan) for Windows. This would cost a lot of money and keep talented engineers away from projects that would make more sense for either company.

 

[rgeneral]

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.

These post are like you are looking for justification for switching. Just do what makes you happy. No need rant. You are not married to Apple.

 

[marstan]

I prefer to buy best-of-breed products and avoid being completely locked in to any ecosystem for anything I buy, not just computers. For computers for my uses, it is Apple laptop, iPhone without question; less compelling a m2 mini pro for the desktop but an Intel NUC for the HTPC (driven by software compatibility). EIZO monitor, Logitech mouse but still Apple keyboards (no good reason just legacy hardware that works) and trackpad.

Apple is still king of design for user friendliness and especially interoperability/integration but, like a lot of companies these days, pretty bad making too many disposable products. As for cost, it is a quality calculation. Smart consumers know that paying more for quality products is usually cheaper in the long run than buying cheap things that don't last and never really perform from the get go. That seems to still apply to Apple products but perhaps getting harder to make that argument.

 

[wtn]

As for keyboards, I bought a Cherry Stream TKL and it's a lot better than anything Apple have produced and is wired so no more dead keyboard, bluetooth crapping out and lag, all problems I've suffered with the Apple one.

Magic Keyboard comes with a USB-C to Lightning Cable.

Plug it in and voilà, it works without Bluetooth. No need to buy another device.

 

[Darren.h]

you can turn that new PC build into a Hackintosh. dual boot Windows 11 and macOS Sonoma and still enjoy the Mac life. Fix and upgrade it too.

 

[NdTonks]

Im with the OP. I was all about Macs for the longest time, but as time goes on the machines get more powerful and the actual applications you can run on the things get smaller and smaller. I mean if you are doing anything other than video/photo editing pretty much...the thing is useless now. Good luck playing the latest and greatest games, good luck running the myriad of awesome applications Windows users have access too. Apple need to rethink their Mac game cause I can tell you if a few of us on here are already over it and moving back to PC I guarantee a lot more than that are doing the same.

 

[Joe Dohn]

None of these things are hard to solve. But they take a lot of effort, ongoing commitment, and possibly collaboration between the two companies to solve them. For example, I just don't see either Apple or Microsoft dedicating a team to writing and maintaining a full graphics driver stack (GL, DX9/11/12, Vulkan) for Windows. This would cost a lot of money and keep talented engineers away from projects that would make more sense for either company.

Apple HAS done that before. So it would definitely be feasible now.

 

[hans1972]

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.

Boot Camp is an abomination and should never had been implemented. You loose the Mac side of your computer! What's the point of having a Mac if you can't run macOS?

If your Windows application can't run decently in a virtual machine under macOS, you shouldn't be using a Mac.

I have been using enterprise Windows software using VMs under OS X and macOS and I have been very happy. Under Apple Silicon and Parallels it's even better for me.

 

[Joe Dohn]

Boot Camp is an abomination and should never had been implemented. You loose the Mac side of your computer! What's the point of having a Mac if you can't run macOS?

No, you don't. You can boot back and forth to MacOS.

 

[hans1972]

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

Almost everything you complained about, could have been complained about by someone with an Intel Mac in 2019.

When you're a user of (low-level) cross-plattform frameworks, libraries, APIs, developer tools, scientific and mathematical tools, Mac really isn't a good platform.

The problem isn't the move to ARM but Apple leaving its UNIX root behind and depreciating a lot of their support for cross-platform APIs and frameworks.

A big problem with a lot of these cross plattform software is that they were developed for Linux or Windows in the first place. The developers expect that macOS will work the same way, but it doesn't.

macOS has many quirks and Apple expects the developer to solve the problem in another way compared to the method used for Windows or Linux, resulting in the cross-platform software to perform badly on macOS and often stop working when Apple updates the OS.

There is no chance Apple will move in a direction supporting your use of the Mac. The move to Arm just makes it worse, since even more old stuff is depreciated or stops working.

 

[hans1972]

No, you don't. You can boot back and forth to MacOS.

Of course, but you're loosing macOS while using Windows. That's the problem.
With a VM you have access to both macOS and Windows at the same time.

 

[oreganoinferno]

Well there is until you find the other one doesn't work.

Man, 25, who sold kidney to buy iPad bedridden for life after organ fails

Wang Shangkun, now 25, was so desperate for Apple's flagship iPod and iPad devices, he decided to sell his kidney in 2011 on the black market in East China

www.mirror.co.uk

Uuuuh I have no words for this!

 

[leman]

When you're a user of (low-level) cross-plattform frameworks, libraries, APIs, developer tools, scientific and mathematical tools, Mac really isn't a good platform.

The problem isn't the move to ARM but Apple leaving its UNIX root behind and depreciating a lot of their support for cross-platform APIs and frameworks.

A big problem with a lot of these cross plattform software is that they were developed for Linux or Windows in the first place. The developers expect that macOS will work the same way, but it doesn't.

I think it depends on the discipline/domain and what kind of people you have there. (Hard) engineering seems to be locked into Windows for most part. Web development is pretty much Mac all the way (and Linux, obviously). Statistics is Linux and Mac (depending of course which tool you use). And so on. Mac community might be smaller, but it is full of really passionate and knowledgeable people. Just look at Homebrew, it's one of the bet package managers around (which is really saying something).

 

[hans1972]

Honestly some of this is a revelation for me. I've been in the Apple echo chamber for ages and convinced it was the right solution for me. Turns out it wasn't. It always pays to actually remain objective.

On that basis I did a light Kepner Tregoe decision analysis initially (to keep myself honest) and a LOT of research and introspection before I did this and came up with the following...

View attachment 2307030

Everything here could have been said by someone in 2019 or even 2015.

Also, when you are insisting on using Numbers instead of Excel on a Mac, you're handicapping yourself. You don't have to use Apple's own solution for spreadsheet, keyboards and mice.

Basically, you're not really an Apple user, but a non-Apple user except you're using a Mac.

 

[MauiPa]

Couldn’t disagree with you more strongly. It seems the only really relevant thing you said is that if you need to run windows only software, if the vendor hasn’t ported it over, an ARM ( and that includes windows on ARM) is not for you

I have a MBP M1 and have encountered no problems. I think windows sucks for too many reasons to mention. I run only software with specific Apple Silicon versions so avoid any emulation

Bottom line. If you need to run windows, run windows

 

[Siliconguy]

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 don't see a problem here. Apple doesn't make a machine that meets your needs. So don't buy an Apple machine.

I'm in the same boat at least on the desktop. And for that reason I have a nice Linux box for about 1/3 of the price of a Mac Studio which is the nearest Apple alternative.

I also have a MacBook Air since for a portable I want light weight and long battery life. LibreOffice supplies my word processing and spreadsheet needs natively on both platforms unlike MS office or Pages + Numbers.

My phone is a flip phone, as all I want from that is long battery life and the ability to make phone calls and texts.

Buy what works for you and quit worrying about ecosystem crossover things.

 

[alexonline]

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.

Parallels Desktop 19 works fine

Windows on a Mac is better than Windows on a PC for most non-gaming-only uses

 

[loopi77]

I know. It’s so weird someone wants to start a conversation on a forum to see if he’s alone! It’s good you were here to post the usual (and super useful) “I don’t get it thread”. It’s important we don’t question Apple and question each other. Apple after all is perfect in every way. It is us that are not worthy.

Erm, I understand op, but nobody here can solve his situation. Apple is Apple, they behave like this since years. Every generation they change things radically, and those discussions don’t help. I don’t defend Apple. I use all kinds of OS. Guess op should do the switch, I only wanted to encourage considering that as a possible solution. Apple will never make a device everyone is happy with and no one has any complaints about. That’s what I learned.

 

[SkyFoxe42]

Lesson from a 30+ year in hardware/software:

It ALL sucks. Let's get the job done.

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

I think I had a nightmare where I dreamt I bought an Android phone and a Lenovo. Woke up screaming.

JK, I have a Lenovo Legion for gaming, it's a nice laptop, but it really can't compare with Apple Silicon Macs. But Android? Whooo boy. Good luck with that.

The trick with android is to run absolutely no Google stuff on it. It's pretty good then! 🤣

 

[LambdaTheImpossible]

Some of this comparison is pointless. You cannot scan with a Mac for your note taking? You cannot use Outlook calendar on a Mac? You can't use Wired mice on a Mac? You can't use Teams on Mac for reminders? Why can't you have two Macs for redundancy like you do with PC? You HAVE to use an iPad for it? You can't use that same OneDrive and you can't even run Spotify on macOS?

The SAME ARGUMENTS can be applied to Windows as well depending on the program.

Actually I missed the notes column off that. Worth pointing out that the Mac situation is my CURRENT situation with no further investment as it stands. This is a statement of the transition not a comparison. My options were:

1. Stick with the Apple ecosystem (stay put)
2. Move to the Microsoft+Android system (transition)

Scanning on the Mac is problematic with my HP AIO. Doing multi-page scans with the document feeder doesn't always work on the Mac but it always works on windows using this glorious bit of software: https://simon-knuth.github.io/scanner/

Outlook for the Mac is dire as is the rest of Office. It's unreliable and it has compatibility issues with some documents. If I'm writing up complex mathematical documents the equation support in it doesn't match the Windows version. And unfortunately I can't use LaTeX as despite the eminent suitability to the task, people only take Word as submission format as it allows them to do change tracking and editing quickly.

Why can't I use wired mice on a Mac? Well I can but the connectivity is a pain in the ass. Everything is USB-C on the mac and the mice are all USB-A. That means I have to hang a dock off it or an adapter off the back of my studio display to do it. On top of that the mouse support on macs is terrible. Getting consistent scrolling direction working on a wheel versus a touchpad is a crapfest.

Why can't I use ToDo on Mac for Reminders I assume is what you are asking. They broke it on the last macOS update. I don't get notifications any more.

Why can't I use two macs. I would have to buy another Mac which to cover my ass would have to be a Mac Mini Pro which means a significant capital expenditure.

Do I have to use an iPad? No not at all. I already have one though so that was considered as my "limp along until I get my mac back" solution. This is a terrible idea. Don't do it.

I already use OneDrive on the Mac

Spotify vs Apple Music is the point. I don't want to continue paying Apple to retain Apple Music. Spotify is a cross platform solution that works on the PC properly (don't even talk to be about Apple Music on a PC - I tried it. Dire!)