this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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All of this stuff makes me sad. As a long(ish)-time Apple user, it's been sad to see them go full throttle into hyper-capital mode. They're literally the wealthiest company on the planet because they've spent the past twenty years figuring out how to nickel and dime their customers. Hell, even when I bought my first MacBook back in '07, the guy in the Apple Store suggested getting the RAM upgrade elsewhere because Apple prices were ridiculous even then. Everyone knows they didn't go with soldered RAM and storage for the performance gains...
But they make incredible hardware, so I tolerate all that shit, making me complicit in the fuckery.
But do they though? I get it that those are mostly nicely designed, sleek devices with great performance but then you have fuckups like the terrible keyboard and the touch bar (by fuckup I mean that people criticized the idea from the start and were proven right by Apple dropping it after few models). For me the hardware is a hit and miss, some things are nice, some features are terrible. And with Apple you can't choose and pick like with PC. When they decide to try silly things like the touch bar you are stuck with them for years. You either don't upgrade or have to get a product with a feature you don't like.
Yes, they really do. There were a few years of fuckups and questionable decisions, but by and large the devices they make are absolutely solid.
I have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home that's running Monterey via Opencore as well as if it was still supported. Until recently I was using a 2015 MBP that was absolutely faultless. I now have an M2 Air that may have some issues down the line that haven't come to light yet, but it seems unlikely. I have two Mac minis at work, a 2011 and a 2014 that are still absolutely capable for the level of work I ask of them. I'm typing this on one of them.
In terms of iPhones/iPads; I've had 7 iPhones and 5 iPads over the years, and the only hardware problems I've experienced with them have been of my own doing (broken screens, water damage, etc...).
So yeah, the 2016-2019 MacBooks had shitty keyboards and questionable I/O decisions, but otherwise the hardware was absolutely top tier.
This is kind of a weird argument. You can't choose which keyboard you get with any laptop.
But with PC I can just choose a different brand. It's super easy to switch.
I also have some really old Dell laptop and I used many Lenovo laptops that worked perfectly after 5-10 years. I agree that Apple's design (like visually) is on another level but when it comes to how long they last compared to other professional laptops I would say it's normal. The repairability is definitely not great. And for me it's really frustrating that you just have to blindly accept all Apple's 'brave' design decisions like dropping ports. I've seen Apple users running around the office with dongles since forever. I'm not saying the design is bad or the laptops are poor quality. I'm just saying IMHO it's not all that better than other professional laptops. Some things are nice (weight, screen bezel, performance), other things are bad (repairability, port selection, keyboard).
It's a different story with phones. Most Android makers suck when it comes to long term support.
Apple products are generally well-designed, but in addition to the occasional genuine screw-up, which they just handle in spectacularly arrogant ways, Apple's engineers are absolutely no strangers to planned obsolescence.
Personally I've only witnessed their habit of using capacitors rated 85°C next to the 90+°C CPU instead of ones rated 105°C and costing a fraction of a cent more.\ Guess which small part fails after a few years and makes a logic board replacement necessary (or 30min with a toolkit and SMD soldering station if you know what the problem is). It's difficult to believe that this is an honest mistake.
The Lightning connector has a design flaw that wears off the contact surfaces way faster than it should.
There are many other stories in self-repair forums that I can't personally vouch for, but at least to me they look credible enough.
IIRC Louis Rossmann has done a YouTube video on it, which I can't find at the moment as the plane wi-fi blocks streaming services.
The lightning connectors problem is that the pins are actually exposed on the end of the cable. With USB-C they're safely housed in a shroud but I guess the one cent worth of metal that would have been required to actually put a shroud on the cable just wasn't worth it for Apple.
Have you ever seen those shroudless USB-A devices they wear out in about 4 minutes.
FYI, the Touchbar isn't dead: https://www.pcmag.com/news/wait-theres-still-a-touch-bar-on-the-new-macbook-pro
I have no love for Apple's hardware (primarily price related*), but since I am completely dependent on Adobe for my work, my OS options are MacOS and Windows. I love MacOS and passionately hate Windows 🙄
My solution was a Hackintosh; chose my own hardware (within compatibility restraints) and built my own computer. The price is miles from what I would have to pay Apple. My system cost roughly $3K (with two 4K screens), compared to the (roughly) equivalent, non-upgradeable options from Apple that start around $5K without screens.
The caveat is that sometimes I need to upgrade hardware to make sure it's compatible with the latest (ish) MacOS versions (because software like Photoshop requires it), and it is a difficult process. Recently had to switch out my graphics card because I was stuck on High Sierra (old card was Nvidia, no support beyond HS), and it took me the better part of a week to get everything working.
Now it works, I'm on Monterey, and everything is chugging along perfectly. For now. Not sure what the future of the Hackintosh will be, but most likely there's a dead end out there somewhere (nearby) as Apple fazes out Intel support.
Still worth it, but I'm dreading the day I have to give up and either pay Apple for hardware, or switch to [shudders] Windows.
Or maybe Adobe will start supporting Linux! 🤣
* I think I might hate iOS even more than Windows, though.
This is why iPads frustrate me so much these days. The hardware is more than capable of running a decently powerful OS, but Apple are insistent on crippling them with a big version of iOS. iOS is fine on an iPhone where the limited screen size means I have no particular desire to do anything too complicated, but the same restrictions on an iPad feel like Apple don't really know how to reconcile what the device can do with not wanting to pull customers away from Macs. I was unexpectedly gifted a 6th gen mini last week which is in front of me as I type and which I'm not entirely sure what to do with.
They make ok hardware but it's not spectacular or anything. The new chips that they put in all of the computers are very very good, but it's not unique you don't have to get Apple products to get that kind of performance and you certainly don't have to pay their Apple prices.