> Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows.
At the time I'd only been a Mac user for a few years and I would have strongly agreed. But definitely things have shifted— I've been back on Windows/WSL for a number of years, and it's software quality/compatibility issues that are a lot of what keeps me from trying another Mac. Certainly I'm far more tempted by the hardware experience than I am the software, and it's not even really close.
That’s so wild to me - my personal laptop is still a Mac but I’m in windows all day for work. Some of the new direction of macOS isn’t awesome but the basics are still rock solid. Touchpad is perfect, sleep works 100% of the time for days on end, still has UNIX underneath.
Same boat, and 100% agree. I couldn’t find a single example of Windows or Windows software where I think the experience is in any way better. Windows only saving grace, as a developer, is WSL.
For a simple example, no app remembers the last directory you were working in. The keys each app uses are completely inconsistent from app to app. And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor. Then there’s the Windows 95-style dialog boxes mixed in with the Windows 11-style dialog boxes; what a UI mess. I spoke with one vendor the other day who was actually proud they’d adopted a ribbon interface in their UI “just like Office” and I verbally laughed.
From a hardware perspective, I still don’t understand why Windows and laptop manufacturers can’t get sleep working right. My Intel MacBook Pro with an old battery still sleeps and wakes and lasts for several hours, while my new Windows laptop lasts about an hour and won’t wake from hibernate half the time without a hard reboot.
I think Windows is the “good enough” for most people.
> I don't think the automation options in MacOS are better than AutoHotKey (even Linux doesn't have something as good).
Did you try Keyboard Maestro https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ (I've never used AutoHotKey and I'd be super curious if there are deficiencies in KM relative to it, but Keyboard Maestro is, from my perspective, a masterpiece, it's hard to imagine it being any better.)
Also I think this statement needs a stronger defense given macOS includes Shortcuts, Automator, and AppleScript, I don't know much about Windows automation but I've never heard of them having something like AppleScript (that can say, migrate data between applications without using GUI scripting [e.g., iterate through open browser tabs and create todos from each of them operating directly on the application data rather than scripting the UI]).
Yeah, the things that AppleScript can do is so crazy.
I've fully automated keeping 1 tab in Chrome logged into a website that insists on logging me out every hour or something. (not banking or anything)
Mac also can't get sleep right. Have you tried to make a macbook consistently be 'awake' when the lid is closed?
You can't, really. Almost everyone resorts to buying an HDMI dongle to fake a display. Apple solved the problem at such a low level, the flexibility to run something in clamshell mode is broken, even when using caffeine/amphetamine/etc etc etc.
So, tradeoffs. They made their laptops go to sleep very well, but broke functionality in the process. You can argue it's a good tradeoff, just acknowledge that there WAS a tradeoff made.
I did for years too, but newer MacBooks no longer allow running with lid-closed unless connected to a monitor, I was disappointed to recently learn this.
If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.
I don’t mean this to sound like I’m being a jerk, but why would I want my MacBook to be awake with the lid closed? If I want it to be awake doing something, I leave the lid open and let the screen sleep. Maybe I’ve been using a Mac too long, but lid closed means sleep to me. I’ll even do that when I have it plugged into a monitor: close the lid to make it sleep.
> And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor.
Oh god, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and switch to 11, huh?
The one thing that has been saving me from throwing my PC out the window in rage has been the monitor I have that supports a "keep alive" mode where switching inputs is transparent to the computers connected to it. So when switching inputs between my PC and laptop neither one thinks the monitor is being disconnected/reconnected. If it wasn't for that, I'd be screaming "WHY ARE YOU MOVING ALL MY WINDOWS?" on a regular basis. (Seriously, why are you moving all my windows? Sure, if they're on the display that was just disconnected, I get you. But when I connect a new display, Windows 10 seems to throw a dart at the display space for every window and shuffle them to new locations. Windows that live in a specific place on a specific display 100% of the time just fly around for no reason. Please god just stop.)
A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail). A number of others were affected by the same issue. There have been show-stopper bugs in the core functionality of Photos as well. I don't get the impression that the basics are Apple's focus with respect to software.
It’s not as if such bugs are unheard of for Windows users, and certainly not Linux users.
But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac, or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake, or a host of other problems you routinely have on both Windows and Linux.
I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.
To compare Apples to apples, you'd have to look at a Framework computer and agree that wifi is going to work out of the box... but here I'm meeting you on a much weaker argument: "Apple's software basics are /not/ rock solid, but other platforms have issues too"
> I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.
I don't find your original anecdote convincing:
> A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail).
E.g., what does this mean? They lost mail messages? How did they verify they had those messages before and after? E.g., file-system operations? GUI search? How much do they know about how Mail app stores message (e.g., I used to try understand this decades ago, but I expect today messages aren't even necessarily always stored locally)? How are you syncing mail messages, e.g., using native IMAP, or whatever Gmail uses, or Exchange? What's the email backend?
E.g. without deeper evidence this sounds more like a mail message indexing issue rather than a mail-messages-stored-on-disk-issue (in 2025, I'd personally have zero expectations about how Mail manages messages on disk, e.g., I'd expect local storage of message to be dynamically managed like most applications that aren't document-based use a combination of cloud functionality and local caching, e.g., found this in a quick search https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/471801/ensure-maco...), but if you have stronger evidence I'd love to hear it. But as presented your extrapolating much stronger conclusions than are warranted by the anecdote in my opinion.
Mail deleted a large number of messages but not all of them. It was stored in files (which were smaller on disk, so not an indexing issue) and recovery required loading snapshots from Time Machine, converting to a format Thunderbird could import and transitioning to that.
You've only addressed something like 30% of the issues I asked about (although I'm honestly impressed you got that far), e.g., I wouldn't call Apple Mail an application designed to managed a collection of emails on disk. Isn't the important question here whether the emails were still stored on the server? E.g., or were they using POP?
I've been using Mac OS since 10.3 and, whilst it's better now, I've had a memorable number of of wifi connection bugs. And ISTR issues with waking from sleep, but that might have been before the Intel migration. It's never been immune from bugs.
> But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac
I want to be able to set different networking options (manual DNS, etc) for different wifi networks, but as far as I can tell, I can only set them per network interface.
There's something like "locations" but last time I tried using that, the entire System Settings.app slowed to a crawl / beachballed until I managed to turn it back off.
> or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake
My m1 MBP uses something like 3-5% of its battery per hour while sleeping, because something keeps waking it up. I tried some app that is designed to help you diagnose the issue but came up empty-handed.
... but yes on both counts, it's light years better than my last experience with Linux, even on hardware that's supposed to have fantastic support (thinkpads).
I come back to my work MBP M2 dead almost everyday and I have to leave it charged or wait 15 minutes for Mac to decide that it is okay to boot even when the power has been connected.
In my case it works roughly ~50% of the time. Probably because of the Thunderbolt monitor connected to power it, idk.
> the basics are still rock solid
The basics like the OS flat out refusing to provide you any debugging information on anything going wrong? It's rock solid allright. I had an issue where occasionally I would get an error "a USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it and replugging it." Which device? Why the hell would Apple tell you that, where is the fun in that?
Key remapping requires installing a keylogger, nor can you have a different scroll direction between mouse and touchpad. There still isn't window management which for the sizes of modern monitors is quite constraining.
> still has UNIX underneath
A very constrained UNIX. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to test something (pkcs11-tool signing with a software HSM), and turns out that Apple has decided that libraries can only be loaded from a number of authorised locations which can only be accessed while installing an application. You can't just use a dynamic library you're linking to, it has to be part of a wider install.
I've been primarily on a Macbook for the past three years, after almost 10 years using Chromebooks as my primary machines (yay work at Google). Until 2015, I had been a rabid defender of Thinkpads (T-series, mostly), and used Windows at work and Linux (mostly Kubuntu) at home, from around 2009-2015.
Long story short, I was very happy with the "it just works" of ChromeOS, and only let down by the lack of support for some installed apps I truly needed in my personal life. I tried a Mac back in 2015 but couldn't get used to how different it was, and it felt very bulky compared to ChromeOS and much slower than the Linux machine I'd had, so I switched to a Pixelbook as was pretty content.
Fast forward to 2023 when I needed to purchase a new personal laptop. I'd bought my daughter a Pixelbook Go in 2021 and my son a Lenovo x1 Carbon at the same time. Windows was such a dumpster fire I absolutely ruled it out, and since I could run all the apps I needed on ChromeOS it was between Linux & Mac. I decided to try a Mac again, for both work & personal, and I've been a very happy convert ever since.
My M2 Pro has been rock solid, and although I regret choosing to upgrade to Sequoia recently, it still makes me feel better than using Windows. M4 Pro for work is amazingly performant and I still can't get over the battery efficiency. The nicest thing, imho, is that the platform has been around long enough for a mature & vibrant ecosystem of quality-of-life utilities to exist at this point, so even little niggles (like why do I need the Scroll Reverser app at all?) are easy to deal with, and all my media editing apps are natively available.
The basics are not rock solid. Even a core feature such as remote management crashes and freezes every 5 minutes when you connect from a non-apple machine, many have reported this over years but Apple just does Apple. Safari is still atrocious when it comes to web api supports. The worst part is, with Apple, we do not know if these are intentional anti-competitive barriers or actual software bugs. I purchased a mac mini simply to compile apps via xcode and can say the core experience is MUCH more buggy than a fresh Windows or Ubuntu install.
Edit: Hard to call intentionally preventing support for web apis a power user thing. This creates more friction for basic users trying to use any web app.
Edit2: lol Apple PR must be all over this, went from +5 to -1 in a single refresh. Flagged for even criticizing what they intentionally break.
Safari adds hours of battery life due to its hyper focus on power consumption. The level to which web API standards are affected is rather immaterial to me. I imagine we’re different consumers though.
Adds hours of battery life to the expense of making your microphone input completely inaudible due to throttling if you background the tab it's running on.
On iOS you cannot even keep a web app running in the background. The second they mutlitask, even with an audio/microphone active, Apple kills it. Are they truly adding battery life or are they cheating by creating restrictions that prevent apps from working?
Being able to conduct a voice call through the browser seems like a pretty basic use case to me.
Breaking things is not extending battery life. Battery life assumes functionality. Breaking functionality to extend it is a scapegoat and the break-whatever-you-want could be provided as a mode instead of one-size fits all, we don't care what breaks approach.
Why would you want to support web APIs? They're all just Google proposing 5000 new ways for advertisers to fingerprint you but doing it through "standards".
Nice strawman. The core of webapis is about opening up lower level functionality from the sandbox/accessibility of the web. Beyond audio and video IO, there's great stuff coming with webgpu and webNN. Web apps are much safer and much more convenient than downloading an app, well in theory they could be if support wasn't regularly sabotaged to protect a corporate interest in walled gardens.
If we dismiss remote management as a non-core feature shouldn't we consider installing a new browser to be advanced usage as well?
I understand that this post is about MacOS, but yes, we are forced to support Safari for iOS. Many of these corporate decisions to prevent web apps from functioning properly spill over from MacOS Safari to iOS Safari.
The best part of MacOS for me is the unix tools. The command line is a real unix command line. And the rest just works. If I need a linux environment I ssh into a VPS.
It doesn't matter for everyone/most. But, yes, having a Unix command line within MacOS is a pretty big win for some of us. Not something I use on a daily basis certainly. And I'd probably set up a Linux box (or ssh into one) if I really needed that routinely. But it's a nice bonus.
Well, kind of.. the commands on Mac OS all just a little bit different and a little bit janky. I still had to relearn all the common commands I use in order to function. I survived 6 months before I went back to a Windows/WSL combo.
Notice the op said Unix not Linux. Gnu made a lot of incompatible changes from the Unix tools it was cloning. Many people in the Linux community prefer the GNU quirks (they are definitely more performance optimized for example). But if you are talking about Unix, the FreeBSD derived userland on a Mac has real Unix lineage.
Or even just containers on the Mac. Unless you need a GPU with specific hardware, or to connect to a cluster, there's ever decreasing need to use remote boxes.
Fully supported Linux + proper suspend-to-RAM are the two things I want out of Apple Silicon and may never quite get. Better online low power states are fine, but I want suspend-to-RAM and suspend-then-hibernate.
If I close my laptop for a few days, I don't want significant battery drain. If I don't use it for two weeks, I want it to still have life left. And I don't want to write tens of gigabytes to disk every time I close the lid, either!
What happens if you enable airplane mode before closing the laptop? That should power down all radios so battery drain should be approximately equivalent to S3 standby.
"Fully supported by whom" is the issue and important one. Apple won't do it and going by support from "most people around here" Hector Martin et al got crumbs for years, nowhere near to support the development.
One can just hand wave "Apple must support Linux and all" but that is not going to get anything done.
I've felt the opposite for more than a decade. On Linux, it's relatively easy for me to choose a set of applications which all use the same UI toolkit. Additionally, the web browser is often called "Web Browser" in the application launcher, LibreOffice Writer "Word Processor", and so on. In general there is far less branding and advertisement and more focus on function. Linux was the first OS with an "app store" (the package manager). CLI utilities available tend to be the full fat versions with all the useful options, rather than minimalist versions there to satisfy posix compatibility. I could go on.
On Linux there is variety and choice, which some folks dislike.
But on the Mac I get whatever Apple gives me, and that is often subject to the limitations of corporate attention spans and development budgets.
> The web browser is often called "Web Browser" in the application launcher, LibreOffice Writer "Word Processor", and so on. In general there is far less branding and advertisement and more focus on function.
Should Emacs and Vim both be called "Editor" then?
To me, this is actually a great example of the problems with Linux as a community, that GUI applications seem to just be treated as placeholders (e.g., all word processors are the same?), but then its inconsistent by celebrating the unique differences between editors like Vim and Emacs. Photoshop, Excel, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro are, in my opinion, crown jewels of what we've accomplished in computing, and by extension some of the greatest creations of the human race, democratizing tasks that in some cases would have cost millions of dollars before (e.g., a recording studio in your home). Relegating these to generic names like "spreadsheet", makes them sound interchangeable, when in my opinion they're each individual creations of great beauty that should wear their names with pride. They've helped improve the trajectory of the human race by facilitating many individuals to perform actions they never would have had the resources to do otherwise.
I don't mind corporate branding in general, e.g., if a company makes a great app, why shouldn't they be allow to put their name on it (in an appropriate place)? (And I do think great apps should have more memorable names than "Photo Editor".) (And I'm not sure I get the connection branding has to "Freedom of Choice"?)
But, to your point, even I'll admit the fact that the Photoshop is called "Adobe Photoshop 2025" is annoying lol.
Where it's mattered for me has been in supporting family like my Grandmother. She's passed now, but ran Linux on her desktop for web and email for about a decade. I set it up for her after her Windows install got a nasty virus. I appreciated that she didn't have to learn that "Safari" meant "the internet" and so on. She didn't even have to know she was using Linux. Just how to get to the web. And Linux desktops made that a little easier for her, and less work for me.
Got it, yeah that's a very valid use case for a setup like that. But I'm not sure there's much that's OS dependent to support a setup like that? E.g., I could do the same on macOS (e.g., on macOS a wrapper `Web Browser.app` could be made that launches Safari in the Dock [with the Safari icon, or any other, if that's desirable]).
I'm a Linux fan and I like that Apple isn't rubber-stamping the two new web APIs a week that Google comes up with. There are hundreds of them, most of them quite small fortunately.
You are right in saying that discoverability has suffered much, by hiding scrollbar and similar changes. Also, you need to move the mouse precisely
to a particular spot to re-enable the scrollbars, there is little wiggle room,
which may may things harder for handicapped people, older users, or people
on the move (e.g. me on a train).
Yeah, e.g. when you have a very short scrollbar and had to guess where it is for more than 5 seconds...I'm kinda grow past that hype, nada, going back to Winux.
It is SUCH a pity that they have extraordinary hardware (even with the price point I'd still consider it a bargin, especially for the air/mini)...
Or just the way the menus are on apps. Some app implement their own file/edit/view menus at the top of the app, then some will use the apple version at the top of the OS. If you plug in a TV to use as a monitor and cannot adjust the aspect ratio you're forced to blindly activate these menus as they're clipped from the screen.
MacOS folder navigation is a complete pain too, sometimes you see the list of OS folders, sometimes you see only the folder you opened in finder. If the menu is clipped due to the above aspect ratio problem, good luck getting to your home folder... No functionality to easily open a folder in terminal. Lots of basics just counter-intuitive.
Yeah, I found it not easy to go up one level in finder. Actually I had to Google when I tried first time. The way that MacOS wants to conceal information from the users is just insane. I don't know how it is justified. Nevertheless it has a good number of ardent fans.
I don't understand. From a pure visual standpoint OSX beats. Linux is not particularly known for looking good or cohesive. But in basically all matters it beats the pants of OSX.
The UX only sucks if you're unwilling to put in a minimal amount of time and effort. After that, it has no equal; it is, by definition, the opposite of vanity.
To me it's not a MacOS vs Windows thing. It's a hardware build quality thing for sure; but even more importantly it's the integration with the OS. Now, you could say we could get a team together and integrate Windows too, but the problem is this is vastly more effective when the hardware and software are co-designed in the same house with strong feedback loops. As a result Apple's product will inevitably be better than those without such an organizational backbone.
Quoth the Tao of Programming:
8.4
Hardware met Software on the road to Changtse. Software said: "You are Yin and I am Yang. If we travel together, we will become famous and earn vast sums of money." And so they set forth together, thinking to conquer the world.
Presently, they met Firmware, who was dressed in tattered rags and hobbled along propped on a thorny stick. Firmware said to them: "The Tao lies beyond Yin and Yang. It is silent and still as a pool of water. It does not seek fame; therefore, nobody knows its presence. It does not seek fortune, for it is complete within itself. It exists beyond space and time."
Software and Hardware, ashamed, returned to their homes.
these days i'd rather have macbook running windows than macos running on standard windows laptop of the same form factor, purely for the efficiency of apple silicon.
Seeing my wife have to deal with BSOD and tedious restarts for Windows updates and myriad just to use Teams/Excel makes me think the software issues are far worse on the Windows side.
Not once in 10 years have I had ti troubleshoot while she uses her personal macOS, but a Dell Latitude laptop in 2025 still can’t just “open lid, work, close lid”.
> Hardware and software both matter, and Apple’s history shows that there’s a good argument to be made for developing integrated hardware and software. But if you asked me which matters more, I wouldn’t hesitate to say software. All things considered I’d much prefer a PC running Mac OS X to a Mac running Windows.
https://daringfireball.net/2009/11/the_os_opportunity
At the time I'd only been a Mac user for a few years and I would have strongly agreed. But definitely things have shifted— I've been back on Windows/WSL for a number of years, and it's software quality/compatibility issues that are a lot of what keeps me from trying another Mac. Certainly I'm far more tempted by the hardware experience than I am the software, and it's not even really close.