I haven’t historically written about technology on my blogs, because I do quite enough of that during the day. I’ve written about some pretty thorny topics over the years, but none of them is likely to attract as much righteous autistic ire as what I’m about to say.
Fair enough. I think that you have a number of slightly niche use cases, to be fair: for starters, most Mac users have no interest in pissing about with command line rubbish (unless it's for automation, and then we had Hypercard, then Automator, and now Shortcuts — all of which have GUIs. And for those who want to make the Mac dance natively, AppleScript is still one of the most intelligible programming languages out there). Mac users use their Macs as tools to get other things done and, given the machine's heritage, preferably through a GUI.
Second, I disliked the butterfly keyboard, so I didn't buy another Mac until the new Magic keyboard (which is absolutely lovely). You, near enough, had the Mac "forced" on you since you got it because it was available — not because it was the right tool.
Third, no one sensible would run Visio or Project: they are terrible applications, and far better native ones exist (see OmniGroup's offerings, for instance, at the higher priced end).
The item that I find most weird in your article, though, is your complaint about the chip architectures. As someone who proclaims to eschew the herd, one might have thought that you might embrace innovation — but this appears not to be the case. Intel has been coasting for years and needed a massive kick up the arse; AMD makes good chips, but lacks the marketing firepower (and subsequent corporate buy-in).
As someone who has been a Mac user since 1997 and has therefore lived throughout all of those chip transitions, I would say that Apple has made them remarkably easy (the most jarring change was from "Classic" MacOS 9 to the Unix-based MacOS 10 — and even that gave one options). On my M1 MacBook Pro (having recently replaced by 2013 MacBook Pro), for instance, the notoriously power- and chip-hungry MS Teams runs incredibly quickly — and it's doing it through the Rosetta 2 translation layer.
The simple fact is that for a "proper" Mac user, the chip transitions have been seamless — the problem is that you are not one of those: you are a Windows user who happens to have obtained a Mac. I have never wanted to run Windows on a Mac: the only times that I have done so, as a web developer, was when we needed to debug for Internet Explorer — and I ran Windows in VirtualBox. I can, of course, no longer do that on my M1 but, fortunately, our customers no longer require that sort of testing.
Each to their own, as they say, but I would suggest that Macs were never going to sit well with your use cases. As a long-time Mac fan (and shareholder), I am sad that it didn't work for you — but it is not a solution for everyone, and plurality is good (which is why you should not use Chrome)...
I have a couple of Linux Laptops set up for specific application on old Lenovo X230s that I use for 3DPrinting, EMail and Webbrowsing.
Linux has improved a lot but it is still too technical for general users. I am by no way and inexperienced admin but I still have to tweak and google around to set up some basic networking on the system. I've just upgraded my Ubuntu to 20.04.3 LTS and although I can browse to my NAS and click to connect drives I can't get the system to restore them on startup. Played about for a few hours yesterday with no joy. There was always another hurdle and there are so many ways to do everything that you can't mix and match. They even removed the clear to desktop button so I'm back to shortcut keys that I keep forgetting.
No matter what they say about Windows, and they say a lot, they really have it down to just plug and play. Linux is much much better from when I first started with it and I have used it for my EMail and Web Browsing for a decade now. It's only a pain if you want to do something outside the basics. Not that long ago adding a printer was a pain. So the basics are improving.
I've always avoided Apple because I didn't like being locked down to only buying Apple kit and not being able to add anything from third parties. Won't even touch their kit at all. Obviously, I'm in the minority as their stuff is used by a lot of people because of the simplicity.
I went from CP/M to DOS and then Windows and haven't touched an Apple device in all that time! I was rather put off by a disastrous demonstration of an Apple Lisa back in the day.
I've tried to migrate to Linux on a number of occasions but always come across something that I wanted to do that had a free Windows programme available and seemed impossible (to me) to complete in Linux...
Fair enough. I think that you have a number of slightly niche use cases, to be fair: for starters, most Mac users have no interest in pissing about with command line rubbish (unless it's for automation, and then we had Hypercard, then Automator, and now Shortcuts — all of which have GUIs. And for those who want to make the Mac dance natively, AppleScript is still one of the most intelligible programming languages out there). Mac users use their Macs as tools to get other things done and, given the machine's heritage, preferably through a GUI.
Second, I disliked the butterfly keyboard, so I didn't buy another Mac until the new Magic keyboard (which is absolutely lovely). You, near enough, had the Mac "forced" on you since you got it because it was available — not because it was the right tool.
Third, no one sensible would run Visio or Project: they are terrible applications, and far better native ones exist (see OmniGroup's offerings, for instance, at the higher priced end).
The item that I find most weird in your article, though, is your complaint about the chip architectures. As someone who proclaims to eschew the herd, one might have thought that you might embrace innovation — but this appears not to be the case. Intel has been coasting for years and needed a massive kick up the arse; AMD makes good chips, but lacks the marketing firepower (and subsequent corporate buy-in).
As someone who has been a Mac user since 1997 and has therefore lived throughout all of those chip transitions, I would say that Apple has made them remarkably easy (the most jarring change was from "Classic" MacOS 9 to the Unix-based MacOS 10 — and even that gave one options). On my M1 MacBook Pro (having recently replaced by 2013 MacBook Pro), for instance, the notoriously power- and chip-hungry MS Teams runs incredibly quickly — and it's doing it through the Rosetta 2 translation layer.
The simple fact is that for a "proper" Mac user, the chip transitions have been seamless — the problem is that you are not one of those: you are a Windows user who happens to have obtained a Mac. I have never wanted to run Windows on a Mac: the only times that I have done so, as a web developer, was when we needed to debug for Internet Explorer — and I ran Windows in VirtualBox. I can, of course, no longer do that on my M1 but, fortunately, our customers no longer require that sort of testing.
Each to their own, as they say, but I would suggest that Macs were never going to sit well with your use cases. As a long-time Mac fan (and shareholder), I am sad that it didn't work for you — but it is not a solution for everyone, and plurality is good (which is why you should not use Chrome)...
I have a couple of Linux Laptops set up for specific application on old Lenovo X230s that I use for 3DPrinting, EMail and Webbrowsing.
Linux has improved a lot but it is still too technical for general users. I am by no way and inexperienced admin but I still have to tweak and google around to set up some basic networking on the system. I've just upgraded my Ubuntu to 20.04.3 LTS and although I can browse to my NAS and click to connect drives I can't get the system to restore them on startup. Played about for a few hours yesterday with no joy. There was always another hurdle and there are so many ways to do everything that you can't mix and match. They even removed the clear to desktop button so I'm back to shortcut keys that I keep forgetting.
No matter what they say about Windows, and they say a lot, they really have it down to just plug and play. Linux is much much better from when I first started with it and I have used it for my EMail and Web Browsing for a decade now. It's only a pain if you want to do something outside the basics. Not that long ago adding a printer was a pain. So the basics are improving.
I've always avoided Apple because I didn't like being locked down to only buying Apple kit and not being able to add anything from third parties. Won't even touch their kit at all. Obviously, I'm in the minority as their stuff is used by a lot of people because of the simplicity.
Good post!
I went from CP/M to DOS and then Windows and haven't touched an Apple device in all that time! I was rather put off by a disastrous demonstration of an Apple Lisa back in the day.
I've tried to migrate to Linux on a number of occasions but always come across something that I wanted to do that had a free Windows programme available and seemed impossible (to me) to complete in Linux...