I'm having to give up on Apple Silicon and macos

[cyb3rdud3]

The enterprise leans heavily in the windows/pc direction for many reasons. A single platform, for the entire business simplifies rollout, management, and support. In my career I've only worked with medium to large organizations, so I can only speak about what I've been through, but the tools that we have to support computers is slanted heavily towards PCs.

A for instance, there's an initiative at my company to prevent non-compliant computers from accessing our corporate network. What I mean by non-compliant is that they need to have certain configurations, like virus scanners, password controls, i.e., your password expires, deep scanners and software to inventory what's installed.

Do you know the biggest offender in the listed, by an order of magnitude? Macs. I'm not saying macs are bad, or incapable of having those programs or settings, but it highlights the issues of my IS department to manage the computers.

Most definitely, we created a policy that its ok to use them but they'll have to be enrolled in our MDM and conditional access policies will be applied. The amount of users that simple lie about having their disk encrypted or virus software installed, never seem to update their software. Don't trust the lot of them

And then there is the current compliance which causes no end of argument with developers throwing their toys out as they aren't allowed to be in the sudo group on their own machine. Now the Linux users have some sympathy, but the Mac users aren't generally aware they were and have no idea how to set it up differently and securely

It is a challenge, and then we haven't even started about mobile phones. LOL Huawei is absolutely scandalous, many users seem to like them but when I point out the security issues where they report one thing I their UI but checking what is actually on the phone is nothing like it. Absolutely shocking, but again an immediate conditional access ban

 

[maflynn]

Most definitely, we created a policy that its ok to use them but they'll have to be enrolled in our MDM and conditional access policies will be applied. The amount of users that simple lie about having their disk encrypted or virus software installed, never seem to update their software. Don't trust the lot of them

Yep, MDM has to be installed, i forgot that for my company disk encryption is a must. I was part of meetings and we use Forescout to scan the network and identify all connections to our network. The reports used from that help us identify the departments and contact them. Macs are by far the majority.

 

[jdb8167]

The enterprise leans heavily in the windows/pc direction for many reasons. A single platform, for the entire business simplifies rollout, management, and support. In my career I've only worked with medium to large organizations, so I can only speak about what I've been through, but the tools that we have to support computers is slanted heavily towards PCs.

A for instance, there's an initiative at my company to prevent non-compliant computers from accessing our corporate network. What I mean by non-compliant is that they need to have certain configurations, like virus scanners, password controls, i.e., your password expires, deep scanners and software to inventory what's installed.

Do you know the biggest offender in the listed, by an order of magnitude? Macs. I'm not saying macs are bad, or incapable of having those programs or settings, but it highlights the issues of my IS department to manage the computers.

I generally work as a contract software developer and most places I’ve worked in the last decade are perfectly happy to let me use my personal Mac as my sole computer while on contract.

At this point I find using Windows nearly intolerable and I wouldn’t take a long term contract that made me use it. I’ve heard varying reports that WSL makes development reasonable on Windows and from others that it is pretty bad. I haven’t used it myself so I don’t have an opinion. But WSL may be the saving grace for using Windows in modern software development.

 

[pshufd]

The enterprise leans heavily in the windows/pc direction for many reasons. A single platform, for the entire business simplifies rollout, management, and support. In my career I've only worked with medium to large organizations, so I can only speak about what I've been through, but the tools that we have to support computers is slanted heavily towards PCs.

A for instance, there's an initiative at my company to prevent non-compliant computers from accessing our corporate network. What I mean by non-compliant is that they need to have certain configurations, like virus scanners, password controls, i.e., your password expires, deep scanners and software to inventory what's installed.

Do you know the biggest offender in the listed, by an order of magnitude? Macs. I'm not saying macs are bad, or incapable of having those programs or settings, but it highlights the issues of my IS department to manage the computers.

My previous company offers Lenovo and Macs. But they require security and monitoring software on all devices connected to the network. If you want to connect your personal phone, you have to have their software on it. Many employees choose not to of course. You can put their software on your personal Mac but it will have the same monitoring and tracking when using it for personal use. So this discourages personal devices. I think that companies really need to go this route as the vast majority of users are not IT professionals.

There are just far more IT professionals in the Windows world and it's easier to find them than it is to find macOS experts. The IT guy used to send people with macOS problems to me because he knew that I could solve them, either from experience or because I read these forums.

 

[cyb3rdud3]

I generally work as a contract software developer and most places I’ve worked in the last decade are perfectly happy to let me use my personal Mac as my sole computer while on contract.

At this point I find using Windows nearly intolerable and I wouldn’t take a long term contract that made me use it. I’ve heard varying reports that WSL makes development reasonable on Windows and from others that it is pretty bad. I haven’t used it myself so I don’t have an opinion. But WSL may be the saving grace for using Windows in modern software development.

We'd be happy for contractors to use their own Mac, but they have to demonstrate compliance with acceptable use policy and secure configuration. Sadly many fail at that, and we can configure it securely for them but then they'll have to enrol to MDM for the duration of the contract, or alternatively accept a company configured laptop.

And yes the ones that do accept the later, do get a nice WSL2 environment for development as we don't allow the tools on the windows side either. Don't get many complaints about it, and have used it myself as well and its pretty good and awesome integration. Still amazes me though how few developers are actually familiar with Linux and production like environments....

 

[cyb3rdud3]

My previous company offers Lenovo and Macs. But they require security and monitoring software on all devices connected to the network. If you want to connect your personal phone, you have to have their software on it. Many employees choose not to of course. You can put their software on your personal Mac but it will have the same monitoring and tracking when using it for personal use. So this discourages personal devices. I think that companies really need to go this route as the vast majority of users are not IT professionals.

There are just far more IT professionals in the Windows world and it's easier to find them than it is to find macOS experts. The IT guy used to send people with macOS problems to me because he knew that I could solve them, either from experience or because I read these forums.

To be fair for mobile phones it's pretty easy to put application protection and data loss protection policies in place. iOS allows for secure management profiles to be installed which are limited purely to the corporate apps, no tracking of personal browsing habits at all. I actually prefer how current Android does it as it creates a separated business environment on the same device with much clearer separation to users opposed to how iOS just throws all the apps together.

Both systems are pretty much mature and not intrusive to the personal phone parts at all.

 

[bottomdown]

I think a lot of people forget what a big deal Apple moving to x86 was for people (and Apple). It opened up so many more options to more people. Buying a mac seemed like less of a risk and back then it wasn‘t much more expensive and made sense to do it when XP and Vista was around and if customers did not get on with OS X they could fall back on Windows. Apple switching to Intel meant more customers from different backgrounds that would help convince developers to port their apps over. It felt like Apple was properly back in the game.

This move to ARM is a big headache as it means moving the underpinnings of essential software components to run on ARM and even Microsoft are struggling to convince others to get this done. There may be a good case to do this but it seems slow going. To be honest I feel Apple are not hungry for the Mac market, it feels like they are too scared and need to protect the iPad because they cannot lose control. I think for Apple when they lose control things get interesting and better for the customers and even better for Apple in the long term. Too much of their priorities over the last few years seemed to be so Eddie and Jonny could drive Ferrari’s and Aston Martin’s.

ARM is being used to build a computer that you don't own in the way you did before. They (Apple nor MS) care about performance beyond getting you to take the bait. What they want is a locked down OS on your computer that reports analytics on you just like they have with ARM smartphones.

 

[bottomdown]

I think that's overstating things. To be sure, this is an issue for those who need x86. But AS has been overwhelimingly popular, so I don't think this is an issue for the vast majority of Mac customers.

The situation is very different from when Apple moved from PPC to x86. Then they had very low market share, and there were many programs that simply were x86-only. Now the Mac market share and ecosystem is vastly larger, so the apps that didn't transition to AS, while they certainly exist, are the exception to the rule.

Apple Silicon has only been popular because Google doesn't work anymore. You can't find honest reviews now, only good reviews. Most people just say something is good because everyone else does. And, Google isn't showing the negative stuff, at least not mostly. So, people like me, thinking Google was showing honest reviews, got tricked into buying an M1 computer that just isn't very good and is quite bad in Apple terms.

 

[bottomdown]

Most definitely, we created a policy that its ok to use them but they'll have to be enrolled in our MDM and conditional access policies will be applied. The amount of users that simple lie about having their disk encrypted or virus software installed, never seem to update their software. Don't trust the lot of them

And then there is the current compliance which causes no end of argument with developers throwing their toys out as they aren't allowed to be in the sudo group on their own machine. Now the Linux users have some sympathy, but the Mac users aren't generally aware they were and have no idea how to set it up differently and securely

It is a challenge, and then we haven't even started about mobile phones. LOL Huawei is absolutely scandalous, many users seem to like them but when I point out the security issues where they report one thing I their UI but checking what is actually on the phone is nothing like it. Absolutely shocking, but again an immediate conditional access ban

Any company that doesn't give admin access to the user of the computer cannot be doing efficient work. I worked at a Fortune 500, and the computers and business processes were so locked down it takes 3 people to do the job of one. I was in R&D and didn't have admin access. I couldn't get a program installed without having it tied to a manangement-approved project. How the hell can I research anything like that!? I left pretty quickly.

 

[cyb3rdud3]

Apple Silicon has only been popular because Google doesn't work anymore. You can't find honest reviews now, only good reviews. Most people just say something is good because everyone else does. And, Google isn't showing the negative stuff, at least not mostly. So, people like me, thinking Google was showing honest reviews, got tricked into buying an M1 computer that just isn't very good and is quite bad in Apple terms.

I guess it depends on what your use is, I love my M1 Max. It is fast, quiet, and just really good. My daughter got my 2019 MBP i7 and also likes it, but whenever I use it I really notice the speed difference. Not sure what you mean by got tricked into buying a computer that just isn't very good...

 

[bottomdown]

We'd be happy for contractors to use their own Mac, but they have to demonstrate compliance with acceptable use policy and secure configuration. Sadly many fail at that, and we can configure it securely for them but then they'll have to enrol to MDM for the duration of the contract, or alternatively accept a company configured laptop.

And yes the ones that do accept the later, do get a nice WSL2 environment for development as we don't allow the tools on the windows side either. Don't get many complaints about it, and have used it myself as well and its pretty good and awesome integration. Still amazes me though how few developers are actually familiar with Linux and production like environments....

No competent person would allow this on their own machine. Just like you want control over your stuff, a competent person would want the same. Which is fine. It just means that the contractor has to be lent a company computer for the job.

 

[cyb3rdud3]

Any company that doesn't give admin access to the user of the computer cannot be doing efficient work. I worked at a Fortune 500, and the computers and business processes were so locked down it takes 3 people to do the job of one. I was in R&D and didn't have admin access. I couldn't get a program installed without having it tied to a manangement-approved project. How the hell can I research anything like that!? I left pretty quickly.

It's very simple, you can often have a choice. You can do what you want but then you can't access company controlled company data resources. And yes full admin access and information security, privacy and data protection don't quite go hand-in-hand I'm afraid. If you don't understand that and don't plan ahead of what it is that you want/need to do then yes I can imagine it feels like you are constraint and for good reasons.

 

[bottomdown]

Not sure what you mean by got tricked into buying a computer that just isn't very good...

What I mean is that I didn't quite realize just how much Google had become an ad platform and less of a search engine. It is actually very hard to find anything negative about big company products on google now. If you google something like "MacBook M1 latency issues" most of the results are just glowing reviews the M1 macs. It's easy to conclude that the product must be awesome. But, I was tricked because I was thinking that the Google results of today are the same as they were last time I bought a computer. They are not. Google is advertising for Apple and doesn't want to show too much negative. That much is obvious to me now. That's how I got tricked.

 

[bottomdown]

It's very simple, you can often have a choice. You can do what you want but then you can't access company controlled company data resources. And yes full admin access and information security, privacy and data protection don't quite go hand-in-hand I'm afraid. If you don't understand that and don't plan ahead of what it is that you want/need to do then yes I can imagine it feels like you are constraint and for good reasons.

You are completely out of touch with what your employees are doing. Your policies are productivity destroying. I'm not saying users should run as a sudo-enabled user. I don't even do that at home. But, they should have some second account that allows them to install software. Either that or accept that your company is a dinosaur and will die. That's basically what is happening at the Fortune 500 I worked at. I have no problem with you looting the corpse, but let's not act like this is some virtuous act.

Actually, I think the point you are making isn't that bad. If that company had given me a computer to try stuff on that only connected to a public WiFi and didn't have any access to the company resources, that would have been a good compromise actually. But, for example, when I was in R&D, if I needed to try out a new program that a customer was using, I simply couldn't. There was no process to get such a project approved, and, therefore, no way to get that application installed. What happens in practice is the old timers just have enough cloud to demand an admin account, and everyone lives in the fantasy that we can be both totally locked down and productive. The reality is most productive people just found any given way to get admin access. It was nothing more than a game of who knows who. It's embarrassing for IT and the production teams to be honest. I just left instead of trying to play that stupid game. Worth noting, I did play the game for a while. They give admin access in 1 year approvals. After my 1 year was up and IT was going to force me to go back to non-admin, I just started taking interviews.

 

[cyb3rdud3]

What I mean is that I didn't quite realize just how much Google had become an ad platform and less of a search engine. It is actually very hard to find anything negative about big company products on google now. If you google something like "MacBook M1 latency issues" most of the results are just glowing reviews the M1 macs. It's easy to conclude that the product must be awesome. But, I was tricked because I was thinking that the Google results of today are the same as they were last time I bought a computer. They are not. Google is advertising for Apple and doesn't want to show too much negative. That much is obvious to me now. That's how I got tricked.

Ok, so google bad, apple m1 good then? Still don't agree with you on that...I get about 204K results on that search phrase using google. Including reddit, apple forums etc.

 

[cyb3rdud3]

You are completely out of touch with what your employees are doing. Your policies are productivity destroying. I'm not saying users should run as a sudo-enabled user. I don't even do that at home. But, they should have some second account that allows them to install software. Either that or accept that your company is a dinosaur and will die. That's basically what is happening at the Fortune 500 I worked at. I have no problem with you looting the corpse, but let's not act like this is some virtuous act.

??? Have you been drinking at lunch time or something? What on earth are you on about? Surely if you value your own data you'd like that organisations are compliant with various data protection and privacy regulations, and by proxy that also means controlling access to their customers data and how that can be used.

 

[bottomdown]

> cyb3rdud3 said:
> Ok, so google bad, apple m1 good then? Still don't agree with you on that...I get about 204K results on that search phrase using google. Including reddit, apple forums etc.


Yeah? What's on page 25?

 

[bottomdown]

??? Have you been drinking at lunch time or something? What on earth are you on about? Surely if you value your own data you'd like that organisations are compliant with various data protection and privacy regulations, and by proxy that also means controlling access to their customers data and how that can be used.

LOL oh so it's the regulations now! This is typical IT being completely out of touch. Productive companies find a way to enable their employees by understanding what business needs they have and designing processes around that. Garbage ones just dictate poorly thought out lock down systems, mumble something about compliance or best practices, and just convince themselves that whatever business needs they are sacrificing couldn't have been that important. Worse yet, they often have a special approval process to get around the lock downs in a tacit admission that their policies are in fact hindering the business. I've worked at 5 companies. There is a direct correlation to home much freedom the user has on the PC and how much work gets done by each person. Maybe the benefit of highly locked down systems is higher than the benefit of productivity. It depends on a lot of things about the business. But, most of the time, that question is simply left unasked. AND, that's why it's out of touch.

 

[bottomdown]

> cyb3rdud3 said:
> Ok, so google bad, apple m1 good then? Still don't agree with you on that...I get about 204K results on that search phrase using google. Including reddit, apple forums etc.


Yeah? What's on page 25?

I'll answer the question for you. When you get to page 14 (the last page Google will give you), it says there are only actually 136 results. This is exactly what I mean by "tricked." It sounds like you didn't know Google's shenanigans either! See!

 

[edubfromktown]

I've used DOS/Windows since it came into existence and OS X / macOS since Kodiak beta days too.

Less of a Windows fan as time has gone by however, I will say Win 11 is actually not too shabby on the work laptop. Even with enterprise protections and less than full OS access it clicks along better than Win 10 had for a year or two (on same hardware).

My 1st Apple silicon experience was a 16 GB refurb Mini which I sold when Studio's were released. I've been impressed with the performance and subsequently purchased a base model M1 Air to replace my wife's 12" Core M MacBook.

At home I use:
An inexpensive i3 8GB Chromebook for e-mail, web surfing, etc.
Keep my trusty old i5 10th gen 13" around for some "Intel" things (Kubernetes and OpenShift) and compatibility with some older macOS apps
Hammer away on a Base Studio otherwise

 

[jdb8167]

ARM is being used to build a computer that you don't own in the way you did before. They (Apple nor MS) care about performance beyond getting you to take the bait. What they want is a locked down OS on your computer that reports analytics on you just like they have with ARM smartphones.

You can literally replace the OS with Linux now. How is that locked down? Sure it is different than before because Apple wants a secure boot but you can literally turn off all the security anytime you want to. It would be stupid to do so but you can do it.

Apple Silicon has only been popular because Google doesn't work anymore. You can't find honest reviews now, only good reviews. Most people just say something is good because everyone else does. And, Google isn't showing the negative stuff, at least not mostly. So, people like me, thinking Google was showing honest reviews, got tricked into buying an M1 computer that just isn't very good and is quite bad in Apple terms.

Or, try and stay with me now, most people who use and review the Apple silicon Macs find that they are excellent, performant, and efficient computers that sip battery and can do single-core tasks faster than most desktop computers.

You keep talking about latency but you don't give any examples. I find no latency issues with my Apple silicon MacBooks. Maybe instead of just ranting, you might open a thread and ask for help?

 

[Joe Dohn]

You can literally replace the OS with Linux now. How is that locked down? Sure it is different than before because Apple wants a secure boot but you can literally turn off all the security anytime you want to. It would be stupid to do so but you can do it.

You can only replace the OS with Linux because some people are reverse engineering the hardware. Apple wanted to avoid the controversy of locking the bios on desktop PCs (locking instead only the BIOS of tablets and cell phones), because they knew this would generate backslash. But they don't provide much help on documentation / drivers.

 

[cyb3rdud3]

I've used DOS/Windows since it came into existence and OS X / macOS since Kodiak beta days too.

Less of a Windows fan as time has gone by however, I will say Win 11 is actually not too shabby on the work laptop. Even with enterprise protections and less than full OS access it clicks along better than Win 10 had for a year or two (on same hardware).

My 1st Apple silicon experience was a 16 GB refurb Mini which I sold when Studio's were released. I've been impressed with the performance and subsequently purchased a base model M1 Air to replace my wife's 12" Core M MacBook.

At home I use:
An inexpensive i3 8GB Chromebook for e-mail, web surfing, etc.
Keep my trusty old i5 10th gen 13" around for some "Intel" things (Kubernetes and OpenShift) and compatibility with some older macOS apps
Hammer away on a Base Studio otherwise

k8s works very well on my M1 Max. So well I rarely shut it down, got it running all the time and don't really notice it...

 

[Spudlicious]

I think that's partly hindsight. The reason for Apple moving to x86 was that PPC development - for which Apple was reliant on IBM and Motorola - had stalled/headed in a different direction, and (at that moment in time) Intel's new Core chips were the best thing available, especially for Apple's flagship laptops (one feature of the new Intel Core processors was better power/performance). The Intel switched happened after Apple had been unable to deliver a PPC G5 laptop, and the first Intel MacBook pros came with a significance performance boost.

Apple didn't initially push Windows compatibility - BootCamp only came out after hackers had demonstrated Windows running on Intel Macs, Parallels promoted virtualisation.

Likewise, with Apple Silicon, I think the #1 motivation has been that it has huge power/performance advantages in the thin, light laptops which probably account for the bulk of Mac sales. It's not just the ARM instruction set: machines like the MacBook Air and 13" MBP were being knobbled by Intel's feeble integrated GPUs, 15/16" MBP by the power consumption of discrete GPUs. The Apple Silicon's integrated GPU performance - plus things like the neural engine, hardware video codecs, fast on-package RAM are just as important as the ARM instruction set - maybe it would have been a better compromise for Apple to build an x86-based system-on-a-chip with those features... except (a) they (probably) couldn't license the x86/AMD64 ISA and (b) they already had a huge headstart on ARM from the A-series processors.

I'm not going to second-guess anybody who says that they can't do their job with Apple Silicon. That's pretty obviously the case if (say) you need to build x86 binaries or your workflow is built around applications which either won't run on Apple Silicon or doesn't perform adequately with Rosetta2. Question is, does that affect enough people to counteract the other advantages of Apple Silicon, especially as the core of the Mac business is - like it or not - thin but powerful laptops which benefit hugely from ASi.

A lot has changed since 2006. Particularly, a little thing called the smartphone & the ripples it caused. Developing "native" software for Windows hasn't gone away, but it's a smaller niche than before relative to the huge rise in developing mobile apps (mostly ARM) or web apps (mostly platform independent). In 2006, if you were developing a website, you had to test it on Internet Explorer or it probably wouldn't work on 80% of browsers. Today, browsers are better standardised, virtually everything is either Chromium or Webkit-based and the modern pain-in-the-backside browser that you can't ignore is mobile Safari. If you need an x86 instance to build or test a binary, just spin one up in the cloud for as long as you need it - that's mainly good for server-side at the moment but running remote desktops is a lot more practical now than it was, and likely to be the future.

For end users, too, the days of needing Windows - or even just IE - to run your online banking (or whatever) are receding - what used to be "Requires Windows XP or later" is now mostly "available for iOS and Android". Even MS Office, although still important, has lost a lot of its dominance c.f. Google Docs etc. Even if you "need Windows software for work" I think the future is going to be remote desktop into a cloud-hosted machine - because that way employers can "outsource" a lot of their regulatory compliance to the host. If nothing else, the Mac market has expanded and there's a better choice of Mac software today than there was in 2007. Again, I'm not saying that "nobody needs Windows any more" - but that's the way the tide is flowing.


ARM itself isn't the big problem - yes, there are a few technical issues that affect complex multi-threading - but the vast bulk of the codebase of anything written in high-level languages is unaffected. The biggie is that, to get real advantages out of Apple Silicon, code has to be optimised to ensure it makes full use of the GPU, media engines, neural engines etc. where possible (and the best way of doing that is to use Metal and other MacOS frameworks wherever possible). In many cases, Rosetta 2 copes admirably with translating the x86 code to ARM, but it can't optimise code for Metal etc.

The dilemma for Apple really is "Do you make the best machine possible for running modern written-for-MacOS software, or do you make compromises to support Windows and/or make it easy to port Wintel software?

I think Apple Silicon has made Macs interesting again - and given things like the MBA a clear performance lead over comparable Wintel machines - whereas Intel Macs were ind danger of turning into PC clones with nicer trackpads.



To re-iterate what the OP said, though - it's not just the cost, but Apple's habit of low-balling the RAM and SD on their base configurations can make getting the better BTO configurations a headache - they often have limited availability, might not be available outside of the Apple online store (not everybody has free choice of supplier) and often won't benefit from deals and discounts. If you spend $1700-$2000 on a Windows Laptop it is very likely to come with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD as standard (unless it's a MS Surface - MS seem determined to make Apple prices look reasonable)

An interesting and - for me - informative post.

 

[Spudlicious]

Firstly thanks for the comments. Well received and interesting all of them.

Quite frankly I'm going to look like a dick here.

I just put £1000 on the table for an experiment and trialled over nearly a month and it went as follows:

Firstly I bought a Lenovo Neo 50s workstation, a relatively meaty in perspective Intel i5-12400 and upgraded it with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro SSD. This is a mid-range current line desktop. This was plugged into my spare Iiyama 27" 4k monitor, Durgod K320 keyboard and reused the MX Master 3 I use with my Mac. I installed a fresh windows 11 64-bit install (not Lenovo crapware stuffed). Network was hard wired 1Gb ethernet to my router.

The good

1. Honestly it's pretty damn fast. It feels slightly more responsive than my M1 Pro MBP.
2. Virtualisation works pretty well. No issues there. I had a whole Kubernetes cluster running on it in the first afternoon.
3. Cheap. So so so so so cheap for what you get. I can't complain there at all. Even the O365 sub at £5.99 a month for personal with 1TB storage is crazy cheap.
4. It was nice to see some things in actual files rather than opaque containers.

The bad

1. Windows 11 is just absolutely ****ing horrible. I spent the first day battling with getting Windows 11 settings and privacy and generally getting it to stop bugging me every 5 minutes about something or other. Since then it's a constant stream of difficult to reproduce things I've had to do to it to stop it annoying me in some new way.
2. Power. This thing will quite happily suck 80W doing what my M1 uses about 20W for.
3. Microsoft's cloud stuff is garbage. The whole O365 and cloud sync stuff built into the OS is absolutely dire. It's unreliable. Within 3 hours of me doing something I'd managed to irreparably corrupt a OneNote notebook. I'm not even starting on OneDrive which has some serious consistency issues with syncing a mere 20Gb of files.
4. Sorry but absolutely nothing even touches the Studio Display. Side by side with the Iiyama which is 99% sRGB and I did colour cal on, it doesn't even compare. It's horrible. Add the Windows 11 HiDPI problems and required 150% scaling blurriness and it's obvious that the Studio Display is more than worth the money. You plug it in, it works and it looks bloody amazing. That's what you're paying for.
5. There is absolutely no competition for the stuff built into macOS. Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Notes/Reminders/Apple Music/Numbers/Maps/iMessage/Safari/Photos are nothing special independently but together they are absolutely amazingly good tools.
6. Microsoft have just discontinued custom domain support for outlook.com unless you fish out money for O365 business which is $$$. This is effectively free with anything but the basic iCloud sub.
7. There is no replacement for Apple Photos and Apple Music that works across iOS and windows. It just doesn't exist. There is nothing. I spend days looking. Spotify is not it for reference! Neither is Lightroom!

Conclusions

1. It's mostly bad on the windows side of the fence. I'm solving the virtualisation gap by renting cloud instances now and doing work on there. If you shut them down when you're using them it costs < $30 a month and there's no hardware around to depreciate.
2. You get what you pay for. I'm paying for Apple and I'm perhaps happier now I've tested this.
3. I probably look like a dick based on my first post but I am a big proponent of owning up to your mistakes. I will wear the dunce hat and sit in the corner and reflect.
4. I burned £1000 on this experiment. I will get perhaps £800 back when I bounce all the crap on eBay. So the total cost of this thread is £200. Please enjoy watching me pissing cash out of the window to hurt myself for no good reason.

As a side note I have sold my iPad Pro because it turns out it's mostly an ornament. The MBP and the iPhone do 95% of the work and the rest does not justify the cost. I will miss it for digital art but I hit cultpens.com and bought some toys to play with on paper for a change. Display is also faster than 120Hz

A wise man changes his mind, a fool never will. You are not a fool.