their extreme delight in lifestyle brand arrogance combined with their tendency to release very bad products from time to time, and their strengths tending to constitute an inversion of windows’ (which is what 90% of computer users are familiar with after all) leads a lot of people to be like “well FUCK apple then” and while there’s a reason that tends to make you look less credible in professional computer contexts, it’s also totally understandable
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it also makes you look less credible to rich people which is probably a more significant factor in pushing folks toward and away from them
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i feel like they’ve gone from the “i can’t imagine using anything else” of 2003-2014 or so to making pretty garbage tier stuff because their focus has been paying the rock to hang out with eddy cue
seems like they’re coming out of that slump though???
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there are still a few categories of dev that you couldn’t do on Windows without playing twister until like a year or two ago and even now it’s borderline, though that obv goes both ways for gfx stuff and I think the ascent of CUDA has been what really made them less inevitable for a plurality of professional workflows, and they’re going to finally have to step up their open source contributions (following Microsoft, as late as possible) for their GPU backends to sort that
“desktop and a Macbook” has really been the right call for the entire last 20 years if you’re willing
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I know it’s not The Point but I’m scratching my head trying to think of what’s causing Cania’s problems because I use a Dell USB-C dock without issue for KVM
it’s probably some combination of the USB switch i’m using, the USB-C hub I’m using, and my general cursed history with computers
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i actually really love the macbook when i’m using it fully as intended. it’s a great little machine for just, like, having a computer in the living room or whatever. now that i’m used to How Macs Work i have few problems with it as a portable device that I don’t do much heavy lifting on.
Sort of. I still have problems with how its interface obscures important functions (like, say, running any programs that aren’t on the Officially Approved List (why does the right-click Open work differently than the double-click open? this is the worst decision I can imagine)) but when i’m essentially using it as a Very Costly Netbook it’s perfect for that.
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oh and the touchpad is unimpeachable, all other touchpads feel like fucking garbage now
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Most exciting prospect of homeownership is having a place for a real desk and a desktop computer, really very excited to not have a laptop
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i think this is part of the problem tbh? apple designed this laptop assuming third parties would fill in the peripheral gap with similarly high-polish goods (iirc they promoted a premium LG monitor that also acted as a thunderbolt hub alongside the mbp at launch) but that never really caught on since only apple was pushing that dock design
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I wonder if the dock behavior is worse when it isn’t also getting power.
The PowerBook, Reborn is so good I feel perverse sentimentality about it but I also have a lot of good memories tied up in GarageBand and iPhoto circa 2007.
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touchbar macbook docks are wildly hit and miss in my experience, you just have to try a bunch and return them until you get one without goofy edge case behaviour
FWIW I’ve been using this Dell dock with a Surface Book 2, M1 MacBook Air, M1 Pro MBP, and a Dell Latitude with only the occasional instance of not picking up peripherals on the first shot. It’s definitely a “get work to buy it” proposition, though.
This does remind me of macOS’s most surprising obstinance: no native support for mouse 4/5 without software hooks into accessibility settings, so I can’t use my comfy Razer x Humanscale mouse’s side buttons.
oh right this is also compounded by some very weird issues with heat & CPU usage depending on which side you charge on. this affected my 2017 model so badly i couldn’t charge through my dock without my brand new computer running noticeably worse
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I went through 3 or 4 USB-C hubs. I’m currently using this one and can vouch that it works well with both my previous 2016 touchbar 13" and my current 2019 intel 15", connected to a single 4K monitor.
I always keep the power connected to it and don’t mind opening the lid to force it to unsleep now and then though, so my standards sound somewhat lower than yours. It at least does not have the truly annoying jank I’ve seen on other hubs, like needing multiple unplug/replug cycles to get anything to show up on the monitor, or USB-A peripherals randomly no longer working
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It’s a lil sad that I looked at that and went ooh DisplayPort because the new MBP’s HDMI port is 2.0.
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The “charging from the wrong identical ports silently destroys performance” thing is unforgivable imo, especially after it persisted for multiple years
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For better or worse most of their errors from the last five years are going to be forgiven on the strengths of these laptops with Intel holding the bag. I spent like 10 minutes hemming and hawing at Framework’s configuration tool on Friday before opting to try the ARM-on-ARM VM route.
They willed a syzygy again.
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apple has to be so happy that intel shit the bed. you know they were going to move to their own chips at some point no matter what, apple wants their margins, they want to control as much as they can, and they had a good hardware team just sitting there pumping out impressive, irrelevant iphone gains every year. they have a sticky user base that wasn’t going to go anywhere regardless of what happened, so you know if intel had competent chips they would’ve just weighed the downsides of a hundred “you can now buy this macbook that has no performance gains over intel chips, with the added bonus of taking on software incompatibility problems” articles and bit the bullet anyway.
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Not to mention Microsoft updated the Surface line last month without a single Windows ARM device because Qualcomm can’t get it together.
the really wild part is that the opposite is true of both these statements in most cases.