A MacBook is very good at what it does. If you tried to spec out a laptop/portable computer for similar tasks, the Mac would be pretty competitive and have longer battery life.
Once you try to do anything that apple didn’t intend for it to do (play games, for example) or if we turn to desktops then the value proposition goes away pretty quickly
Your computer always has been limited by the intentions of the system designer. It’s not malice, it’s market-fit and optimization.
Look at those x3d variants that amd has been putting out. Fantastic for gamers, but relatively niche for general computing tasks. If I were an OEM, would I pick those parts for my workstation prebuilts? Fuck no, they’re overpriced for someone using office and a web browser. But for my gaming line, maybe, if I could get a deal.
All computers have many of these price/performance/size/power draw/availability decisions to make, and portables even more so. Apple knows that most of their users need xyz, and they build for that. Everyone else’s needs go into the pile of lower priority, some of which will be supported if they feel like it.
That’s not apples to apples. If you spec a windows laptop, good luck getting the same performance and the same battery life and portability at the same price. Also build quality, screen, speaker and trackpad quality will likely not be at apples level from the windows machine. If that’s what you’re in the market for Apple machines are not bad. For instance a photographer/videographer working on location, truly amazing for them. Should everyone buy one? No. Are there a 100 better ways to spend the money if you don’t have that specific Apple favoured use case. Sure, e.g. your mum doesn’t need a MacBook Pro for Facebook / Amazon browsing and your cousin shouldn’t buy a Mac Studio for gaming. But use cases do exist, and for those people Macs are genuinely a good proposition.
A beefy PC that you’re going to be itching to upgrade in 2 years.
I will say though, if you’re planning on gaming then Mac is still a no go. It’s best for design and audio professionals. Average joes should just be getting a Chromebook or something.
You really don’t get any of those things. Be a Mac fan if that’s your thing, but don’t try to pretend they’re actually any better because all the PCs you’ve used have been trash.
And I prefer touchpads and find using a mouse on Mac a terrible experience. Touchpad gestures are a constant part of my workflow on a laptop due to the nature of only having one screen.
Like I said though, Mac touchpads are miles ahead of windows touchpads and it’s not even close to a competition.
What you using all that power for? Gaming? Not likely on Mac, Machine learning? Also not likely with that GPU… Maybe a Photoshop machine? Enjoy that non expandable ram.
For a nice dev machine I get it, nice battery life and watch Netflix on a screen, but it’s not like you can’t get a same performance machine for the same/lesser price with Dell/Thinkpad and use Linux…
That’s a rather narrow set of use cases. For example, they are audio and video editing powerhouses. Audio in particular is exceptional because of core audio in MacOS.
And upgradable components aren’t something 95% of the population is worried about. Max out what you need when you buy it. My last Mac lasted 8 years with no trouble. And by the time I was ready to upgrade, the bottleneck was mainly the cpu, which in a case of 8 years, that means a new motherboard, and at that point you might as well upgrade the whole computer, as standards have changed and updated.
Apple silicon has a pretty decent on-board ML subsystem, you can get LLMs to output a respectable number of tokens per second off of it if you have the memory for them. I’m honesty shocked that they haven’t built a little LLM to power Siri
far beyond the close competition in both quality and performance
It’s true that Apple continues to be the king of build quality. And while they do currently hold the performance per watt crown, there are plenty of laptops that beat the M2 when it comes to raw performance, especially if you throw in a dGPU. And of course, none of this matters if the device doesn’t run the software you want, which is what I suspect most people on Lemmy have issue with.
Yeah, I remember XP and Seven as solid OSes where everything just worked.
Now it’s a mix of crap, hey this app is in night mode, this one isn’t! Want to change a parameter? Ha ha you can’t! You want to share a folder? Good luck!
And it’s heuristics/analysis just because Windows is inherently insecure drags any pc down to a crawl…
And publicity??!
Aurgh
Edit: can I run my old CS3 Photoshop in wine or something? And 3dstudio without crazy lags? If so I’ll stop using windows completely.
Windows 7 was peak Windows. They smoothed out all the problems of Vista (plus hardware caught up to the recommended specs) and all the new tech that Vista introduced matured a bit. Was one of the nicest looking operating systems they ever released too - though that is highly subjective.
Everything after has introduced some form of garbage in it’s iteration. Windows 8 had a garbage tablet interface that sucked when used with keyboard/mouse. Like the majority of devices that it was installed on. Windows 10 rolled back some of those shit changes but was the version Microsoft started implementing their adware. Windows 11 took it to 11 and put in a bunch of hardware requirements that conveniently required you to dump some money into Intel hardware.
Been running Linux for last six months and it is crazy how much better it runs. It isn’t as cumbersome to use as the old days… But every once in a while I run into something that requires Googling and tweaking in Terminal. It’s been my best experience with the OS though going back to WAY back (Mandrake and Slackware days - or are they still around? Early 2000’s maybe???)
Krita’s always done transparency just fine for me. It’s pretty good these days. There’s also a built in option to set your keyboard shortcuts to the same ones that Photoshop uses.
Yeah, I try never to underestimate the value of sheer familiarity. New software is like breaking in a new pair of leather shoes, sometimes you have to bleed a little before your feet adapt and you adjust it to fit.
I switched to MacOS last year and it’s so much better. Considering a full Linux switch when this iMac is too old unless the VisionPros turn out to be as good as advertised
I’m using Windows 10 at home and 11 at work. I’ve already turned an old gaming laptop into a Linux machine, and I don’t think I’ll ever switch to Windows 11. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the moment I read an article about Microsoft’s vision to make Windows entirely cloud based.
Eventually everyone’s going to reach a breaking point where they feel subscriptioned out. I’ve already reached that point, but it appears the threshold for most people is much greater than mine, unfortunately.
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But then I’d have to support Macintosh’s overpriced garbage.
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Right. Buy products that is not only expensive to buy, but also expensive to repair. Pass…
And you are forced to give up system control, and choice of software
You will even have to give up compatible software because Apple deemed it “too old”
Before I will even think about buying a Mac I will buy a Framework laptop and install debian.
And I don’t even use Linux outside of a home server.
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The close competition? For the price of a MacBook you could get a beefy ass PC.
A MacBook is very good at what it does. If you tried to spec out a laptop/portable computer for similar tasks, the Mac would be pretty competitive and have longer battery life.
Once you try to do anything that apple didn’t intend for it to do (play games, for example) or if we turn to desktops then the value proposition goes away pretty quickly
So my all-purpose PC is now limited by the intentions of the silicone manufacturer, and therefore it’s better than the other options?
Your computer always has been limited by the intentions of the system designer. It’s not malice, it’s market-fit and optimization.
Look at those x3d variants that amd has been putting out. Fantastic for gamers, but relatively niche for general computing tasks. If I were an OEM, would I pick those parts for my workstation prebuilts? Fuck no, they’re overpriced for someone using office and a web browser. But for my gaming line, maybe, if I could get a deal.
All computers have many of these price/performance/size/power draw/availability decisions to make, and portables even more so. Apple knows that most of their users need xyz, and they build for that. Everyone else’s needs go into the pile of lower priority, some of which will be supported if they feel like it.
That’s not apples to apples. If you spec a windows laptop, good luck getting the same performance and the same battery life and portability at the same price. Also build quality, screen, speaker and trackpad quality will likely not be at apples level from the windows machine. If that’s what you’re in the market for Apple machines are not bad. For instance a photographer/videographer working on location, truly amazing for them. Should everyone buy one? No. Are there a 100 better ways to spend the money if you don’t have that specific Apple favoured use case. Sure, e.g. your mum doesn’t need a MacBook Pro for Facebook / Amazon browsing and your cousin shouldn’t buy a Mac Studio for gaming. But use cases do exist, and for those people Macs are genuinely a good proposition.
A beefy PC that you’re going to be itching to upgrade in 2 years.
I will say though, if you’re planning on gaming then Mac is still a no go. It’s best for design and audio professionals. Average joes should just be getting a Chromebook or something.
Then you’d have a laptop twice as thick, 1/5th the battery life, be built worse, and have an awful trackpad.
You really don’t get any of those things. Be a Mac fan if that’s your thing, but don’t try to pretend they’re actually any better because all the PCs you’ve used have been trash.
I’ve yet to find a PC laptop that can replicate a Mac TouchPad. They’ve gotten better in the last few years, but are still miles off Apple.
They’re not better for everything, but some stuff they’ve absolutely nailed over the competition and it’s not even close.
If I’m honest I hate touchpads in general, even Macs. I’ve got a brand new top of the line Mac issued by my company. I use a mouse.
And I prefer touchpads and find using a mouse on Mac a terrible experience. Touchpad gestures are a constant part of my workflow on a laptop due to the nature of only having one screen.
Like I said though, Mac touchpads are miles ahead of windows touchpads and it’s not even close to a competition.
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What you using all that power for? Gaming? Not likely on Mac, Machine learning? Also not likely with that GPU… Maybe a Photoshop machine? Enjoy that non expandable ram.
For a nice dev machine I get it, nice battery life and watch Netflix on a screen, but it’s not like you can’t get a same performance machine for the same/lesser price with Dell/Thinkpad and use Linux…
That’s a rather narrow set of use cases. For example, they are audio and video editing powerhouses. Audio in particular is exceptional because of core audio in MacOS.
And upgradable components aren’t something 95% of the population is worried about. Max out what you need when you buy it. My last Mac lasted 8 years with no trouble. And by the time I was ready to upgrade, the bottleneck was mainly the cpu, which in a case of 8 years, that means a new motherboard, and at that point you might as well upgrade the whole computer, as standards have changed and updated.
Apple silicon has a pretty decent on-board ML subsystem, you can get LLMs to output a respectable number of tokens per second off of it if you have the memory for them. I’m honesty shocked that they haven’t built a little LLM to power Siri
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Or a beefy laptop that can do more than send emails and Photoshop lol
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It’s true that Apple continues to be the king of build quality. And while they do currently hold the performance per watt crown, there are plenty of laptops that beat the M2 when it comes to raw performance, especially if you throw in a dGPU. And of course, none of this matters if the device doesn’t run the software you want, which is what I suspect most people on Lemmy have issue with.
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Windows : making Linux better by comparison!
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Yeah, I remember XP and Seven as solid OSes where everything just worked.
Now it’s a mix of crap, hey this app is in night mode, this one isn’t! Want to change a parameter? Ha ha you can’t! You want to share a folder? Good luck!
And it’s heuristics/analysis just because Windows is inherently insecure drags any pc down to a crawl…
And publicity??!
Aurgh
Edit: can I run my old CS3 Photoshop in wine or something? And 3dstudio without crazy lags? If so I’ll stop using windows completely.
Windows 7 was peak Windows. They smoothed out all the problems of Vista (plus hardware caught up to the recommended specs) and all the new tech that Vista introduced matured a bit. Was one of the nicest looking operating systems they ever released too - though that is highly subjective.
Everything after has introduced some form of garbage in it’s iteration. Windows 8 had a garbage tablet interface that sucked when used with keyboard/mouse. Like the majority of devices that it was installed on. Windows 10 rolled back some of those shit changes but was the version Microsoft started implementing their adware. Windows 11 took it to 11 and put in a bunch of hardware requirements that conveniently required you to dump some money into Intel hardware.
Been running Linux for last six months and it is crazy how much better it runs. It isn’t as cumbersome to use as the old days… But every once in a while I run into something that requires Googling and tweaking in Terminal. It’s been my best experience with the OS though going back to WAY back (Mandrake and Slackware days - or are they still around? Early 2000’s maybe???)
Why cs3 when krita would have more features and be free? Familiarity?
Because I’m used to it I guess, and I haven’t found a single app that handles pixels and transparency well.
Like zoom in like crazy, update 1 pixel, save, transparency is still there.
Haven’t looked for a bunch of years though, maybe it’s time to try again :-)
Krita’s always done transparency just fine for me. It’s pretty good these days. There’s also a built in option to set your keyboard shortcuts to the same ones that Photoshop uses.
Well then I’ll have to re-check it out :-)
Cheers
Yeah, I try never to underestimate the value of sheer familiarity. New software is like breaking in a new pair of leather shoes, sometimes you have to bleed a little before your feet adapt and you adjust it to fit.
Or a whole lot if you go the Blender route…
I guess it’s like smoking.
You know it’s bad for you, and it costs a lot, but it’s a hassle to drop, so you just keep smoking anyway.
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That obviously sucks but it isn’t limited to windows, right?
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Since 1998
I switched to MacOS last year and it’s so much better. Considering a full Linux switch when this iMac is too old unless the VisionPros turn out to be as good as advertised
I’m using Windows 10 at home and 11 at work. I’ve already turned an old gaming laptop into a Linux machine, and I don’t think I’ll ever switch to Windows 11. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the moment I read an article about Microsoft’s vision to make Windows entirely cloud based.
That’s so they can run everything as SaaS and bill you monthly to use the computer you already paid for.
Eventually everyone’s going to reach a breaking point where they feel subscriptioned out. I’ve already reached that point, but it appears the threshold for most people is much greater than mine, unfortunately.
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MacOS has been fine for awhile now, but Apple’s hardware is very expensive. They’re great for productivity but not so much for gaming.
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=beYODfD2ipo&
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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This is pretty much my view, hardware is good, software is good, price is stupid, and Apple being Apple can suck. But I’m happy with it
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Dell precision 5570
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ive slapped mint on so many PCs… people barely know its not windows
most people only use the freakin browser
I have a friend who runs MacOS too. She bought it used and it’s a desktop so it isn’t impossible to repair.
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