I think you're using it wrong.
Granted you have to do a little config after the install but I am NEVER bugged about anything.
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Apple killed my interest in ARM and Macs
- Thread starter LambdaTheImpossible
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Granted you have to do a little config after the install but I am NEVER bugged about anything.
Well I bought it because of the promises of it being a trade off of a reasonable note taking machine and a media consumption portal rather than a laptop but Apple do promote it heavily as a laptop replacement device. But it's an 11" Pro. The thing is a disappointment from end to end. It has all the compromises and they are all the wrong ones. I'll get into that in another thread.
My points about numbers were missing from the notes column which was trimmed off.
Numbers could be an excellent product. It has a really decent mobile user interface and conceptual model that differs from other spreadsheets in a positive way. And it's actively developed and the right price (free with the hardware). The problem is that it is supremely dangerous when it comes to data loss and that is because the whole synchronisation model is a mess. If you edit something on your Mac, switch to the ipad, make an edit there and the wifi craps out, then switch back to the mac and make ONE edit, when the network decides to reconnect the ipad copy will overwrite any changes you make on the mac version in front of your eyes. And then when you look in the iCloud history online (as the previous versions menu only works 20% of the time without Numbers closing) it takes up to 5 minutes to recover the previous version. Now the above issue I mentioned to an ex-Apple SRE who worked on iCloud a few months back and he said to me "oh you keep your data in there - good luck with that one". The issue was reported to Apple as well with a working test case. No response, no fix in the last year.
The plan was to use Numbers for personal use and use Excel for work as it is required.
So I wanted to be an Apple User but they couldn't deliver a product that actually worked properly there.
Parallels Desktop 19 works fine
Windows on a Mac is better than Windows on a PC for most non-gaming-only uses
That's the silliest thing I've heard for a number of years.
I mean Linux is better as a VM somewhere, but Windows, nooooo waaaay.
Hardware upkeep is insane? I just throw it in a bag as I have for many years. No issues.
Incredibly tiny USB-A to C adapters exist—I've used one off the back of my Studio Display and somehow I managed to survive.
The pettiness of many of your complaints is bonkers. I don't think you're going to be happy on any platform.
You *have* Excel...but you want to use Numbers, for no reason, and you want to use iCloud document systems that you've tested and found faulty.
Is this a kind of very obscure comedy performance?
Been using Apple computers since the SE30 days. I have had only two Apple device failures and they both were the last version of the iTouch where the battery swelled and the case split.
At one point I was running DEC PDP-lls with 3 operating systems (RT-11, RSX, and RSTS), Vax 730 with VMS, Microsoft DOS ands Windows and all the Apple software since 1990 and more hardware than I can remember.
Like my Apple stuff now the best as it just works for me.
At one point I was running DEC PDP-lls with 3 operating systems (RT-11, RSX, and RSTS), Vax 730 with VMS, Microsoft DOS ands Windows and all the Apple software since 1990 and more hardware than I can remember.
Like my Apple stuff now the best as it just works for me.
I’ve been a Mac user since the 1980s and I’m headed the same way as the OP. I currently oversee somewhere around $100,000 of Mac hardware yet am completely disenchanted with the current situation and lack of support.
It seems the only thing Apple is good at is raising prices and lowering support.
I’m waiting this out a bit in hopes things will change with the maturation of AS, but it looks like my next editing workstation will be a PC.
It seems the only thing Apple is good at is raising prices and lowering support.
I’m waiting this out a bit in hopes things will change with the maturation of AS, but it looks like my next editing workstation will be a PC.
A lot of people say you can't boot Windows natively anymore on Macs. Remember the days of the PowerPC Macs, your only way for you to run Windows was through emulation using VirtualPC. I have been playing with one of my vintage PowerBook G4's with VirtualPC 7 and Windows XP. It is super slow. Compare that to Parallels or VMWare Fusion with Windows 11, it basically feels like native speed or even faster. You don't even have to boot Windows, you can run apps in coherence which feel and behave like native Mac apps.
My experiment with iCloud ended for a similar reason. ICloud went on a hunt through every Mac or tablet deleting every copy of a file I wanted deleted from only one place. Fortunately a copy was on a USB drive that was not plugged in at the time. I logged everything out of iCloud and put it on the Never Again list.
I share some common uses of Macs with the OP, but not all the complaints there. Typesetting has nothing to do with good hardware---LaTeX/TeX stuff are ASCII-type files after all. Math software and image processing are another matter, though.
I run a 6,1 and a 5,1, both with 64GB RAM and my main complaint is the huge power consumption, compared to my base Mini M1. But the latter's non-upgradeable 8GB RAM is a nightmare.
I run a 6,1 and a 5,1, both with 64GB RAM and my main complaint is the huge power consumption, compared to my base Mini M1. But the latter's non-upgradeable 8GB RAM is a nightmare.
I hate to break this to you but intel is ditching both the generational notation and the i notation…
I’m a software engineer, all my tooling runs on macos, it’s actually more of a pain to deal with WSL to get the same, so, uh, no, it’s not just folks doing video and photo editing. And go to any tech conference, easily 70% or more of the laptops you’ll see everyone using are macs, for largely this reason.
It seems like a lot of your problem is you want all or nothing. I use dell and lg displays with my macs, I use excel on macos (if you really want the windows vers btw running it in parallels rootless doesnt really take much of a performance hit), I’ve used pandora on my mac, I dont use Apple’s current mice or keyboards as my standard input (I have an ADB Apple Extended Keyboard 2 with an adapter as my main keyboard, which also works with my windows gaming machine on the KVM just fine, and logitech mice as my primary mice), etc
On the notes side on an ipad btw I recommend notability, for window mgmt using your keyboard on a mac I recommend divvy, used to recommend spectacle which is free but it’s now unmaintained.
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.
I can certainly sympathise with some of the points @LambdaTheImpossible makes. The original post was quite thought-provoking, and caused me to wonder whether, all things considered, I am still happy with the Apple kit I own and have owned over the last 15 years. My conclusion is that I am, very much so. So perhaps I might offer an alternative view?
There have been times when I have felt mildly peeved by Apple’s prices and some of their products’ idiosyncrasies. That said, with a combination of 2008 and 2013 Mac Pros, a 2012 retina MacBook Pro, several iPads and, to some extent, a 2019 MacBook Pro, things I’ve happily done include some fun computational number theory on GPUs (quite rudimentary perhaps, but pleasing to me), using Mathematica, prototyping code for real-time capture & analysis of network traffic data and amusing myself with a variety of Python projects. Along with all of the usual, mundane “productivity” stuff, trying not to spoil my photographs in Lightroom or PixInsight and spending far too much time reading and playing chess on iPads. Using LINUX virtual machines when appropriate (including, in an act of extreme silliness, to run APL on Ubuntu/390 in Hercules in a Ubuntu vm). I find the ability to use such a range of software without any real difficulty on a single platform rather amazing. Perhaps I am unusual in not needing Windows (not even under Fusion or Parallels).
Could I have done all this on a mixture of Windows and LINUX machines? Sure, and I would probably have spent less money. Was the 2013 Mac Pro perfect? Far from it, and I realise that for some purposes it was a pretty duff design. The 2019 MBP seems to get hot and to spin up the fans far more than I would like. But I have been able to do everything I wanted — and I still can — without drama and with no hardware problems aside from, eventually, after seven or eight years, cooking the dGPU on the 2012 rMBP (which was probably my fault for treating it like a workstation and letting it get too hot too many times). Oh, and the rMBP needed a new keyboard when I dropped it on hard ground when using it outside in the dark with my telescope. I rather think that was my fault, not Apple’s. It still worked, though (and didn’t mind the dew).
So, overall, I’m pretty satisfied with what the kit has enabled me to do and, perhaps more importantly, with what I have learned using it (although, given how long I tend to keep computers, I’m probably far from the ideal customer; I’m still very happy with my iPhone X, for example). And I am happy not to use Windows. I’m quite excited by the prospect of buying an M3 Max or Ultra machine soon (possibly very soon ….) and am confident that I will get plenty of enjoyment from that, too. That doesn’t preclude the possibility of getting a reasonably high-end Nvidia GPU to experiment with although, given that even the M3 Max’s GPU will be four to five times more powerful than my currently machines’ GPUs, I may not bother with that for now. The kit I have been fortunate to own has been more than good enough for me and, as I haven't had major problems, there has been no compelling reason to change. For me, life is too short to spend time worrying about whether the alternatives might be better (even though, in some respects, they may be). YMMV.
There have been times when I have felt mildly peeved by Apple’s prices and some of their products’ idiosyncrasies. That said, with a combination of 2008 and 2013 Mac Pros, a 2012 retina MacBook Pro, several iPads and, to some extent, a 2019 MacBook Pro, things I’ve happily done include some fun computational number theory on GPUs (quite rudimentary perhaps, but pleasing to me), using Mathematica, prototyping code for real-time capture & analysis of network traffic data and amusing myself with a variety of Python projects. Along with all of the usual, mundane “productivity” stuff, trying not to spoil my photographs in Lightroom or PixInsight and spending far too much time reading and playing chess on iPads. Using LINUX virtual machines when appropriate (including, in an act of extreme silliness, to run APL on Ubuntu/390 in Hercules in a Ubuntu vm). I find the ability to use such a range of software without any real difficulty on a single platform rather amazing. Perhaps I am unusual in not needing Windows (not even under Fusion or Parallels).
Could I have done all this on a mixture of Windows and LINUX machines? Sure, and I would probably have spent less money. Was the 2013 Mac Pro perfect? Far from it, and I realise that for some purposes it was a pretty duff design. The 2019 MBP seems to get hot and to spin up the fans far more than I would like. But I have been able to do everything I wanted — and I still can — without drama and with no hardware problems aside from, eventually, after seven or eight years, cooking the dGPU on the 2012 rMBP (which was probably my fault for treating it like a workstation and letting it get too hot too many times). Oh, and the rMBP needed a new keyboard when I dropped it on hard ground when using it outside in the dark with my telescope. I rather think that was my fault, not Apple’s. It still worked, though (and didn’t mind the dew).
So, overall, I’m pretty satisfied with what the kit has enabled me to do and, perhaps more importantly, with what I have learned using it (although, given how long I tend to keep computers, I’m probably far from the ideal customer; I’m still very happy with my iPhone X, for example). And I am happy not to use Windows. I’m quite excited by the prospect of buying an M3 Max or Ultra machine soon (possibly very soon ….
) and am confident that I will get plenty of enjoyment from that, too. That doesn’t preclude the possibility of getting a reasonably high-end Nvidia GPU to experiment with although, given that even the M3 Max’s GPU will be four to five times more powerful than my currently machines’ GPUs, I may not bother with that for now. The kit I have been fortunate to own has been more than good enough for me and, as I haven't had major problems, there has been no compelling reason to change. For me, life is too short to spend time worrying about whether the alternatives might be better (even though, in some respects, they may be). YMMV.
Would I be right to think that you have never used an ICL1900?
(Paper tape is such a pain in the a@*#*.)
No thank goodness. I did however deal with a hell of a lot of gunk in the late 80s and early 90s on SunOS with QIC tapes which was just as abhorrent because at least your card punches and readers worked properly!
No it was a test case which failed so I excluded it from "reasonable things I will consider using".
Think of the order:
1. Using Excel for work. Don't want to pay for an O365 sub for personal use.
2. Try Numbers because it's free and ecosystem integrated.
3. Find out it's a crapfest as is iCloud.
4. Move back to plan B which is pay for an O365 sub
5. Remove stuff from iCloud because iCloud is actually dangerous and a data integrity risk.
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.
Pah. We used to dream of punched cards. I’m talking about paper tape
.At least if one dropped a deck of cards, they could be shuffled back into roughly the correct order. Whereas I don’t think I ever managed to mend a torn strip of paper tape with sellotape (IIRC, it was pretty much impossible not to block the little holes).
(Actually, I did subsequently have the pleasure of using IBM card punches and readers. As you say, they just worked properly. I used to love the whooshing noise the readers made. Punched cards are also great for making notes on.)
With apologies for the total digression.