I admit, a 16" screen in a 15" body sounds really nice. But most of this is stuff other brands already had.
People were annoyed because they don't want to run a different OS. Yes, you could get cheaper/powerful hardware somewhere else... but it's not macOS. Hackintoshes need not apply here.
Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either. They used to be brilliant developer laptops, but Apple seems to want everybody in their walled garden.
That would be System 76 https://system76.com/laptops/adder with their pop OS linux distro https://system76.com/pop
- Application support for graphics editors that people need in 2019... you can either run macOS or Windows for this
- Built-in cross-device syncing like iCloud/CloudKit
- Smooth integration with peripheral devices (e.g, HandOff)
This list could be extended for quite a ways, as people seemingly want to ignore part of what still makes macOS great - you have very well done product integration across the entire stack. I want it to "just work" in 2019 so I can live my life instead of tinkering with an OS/hardware combo.
The analogy I like to give people is that buying a Macbook is kind of like buying a BMW after years building your own tuner car. I'll always enjoy building my own, but man... if my daily driver breaks, I just wanna pay someone to fix it. Gimme the luxury feel already.
> Thing is, Mac OS isn't as great as it used to be either.
That's 100% true. MacOS gets a little worse with each new release.
But there is still one area where MacOS shines: backup and restore. I've had the same user account on five different machines now, because I just restore from a time machine backup every time I buy a new Mac.
And I cannot think of an easier way to backup my wife's laptop than pointing it at our time machine server and letting it just work.
Time machine is the biggest thing keeping me on MacOS right now. If your fancy Linux distro solved that, I'd be very tempted to switch.
It has plenty of differences from Mac OS, but most of them are positive.
If Google could get Adobe on-board with Linux support, and built a consumer foot-print a la Apple, I'd probably go there.
Dealing with their crappy third-party resellers is just a non-starter. It says that Google doesn't stand behind their own product with their own customer service, and I just can't abide that.
What surprise me is on the laptop keyboard layout has dedicated Print Screen and Insert keys but no Home and End keys.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/09/12/huawe...
They did, they're Pixelbook from Google. Once you build a competitive 'mass market' laptop with Linux, you'll inevitably end up with something like ChromeOS.
My summarized conclusion is that: OS X isn't that great. It's not "bad," don't get me wrong, but it's nothing marvelous. Perhaps at one point in time there was some advantage over a Windows or linux environment but at this point in time, unless you're tied to some package tied to a specific environment for some reason, just work with the environment you're most comfortable with. I don't know how much time I've had to waste adjusting to the OS X environment (especially muscle memory keyboard shortcuts I'm accustomed to), finding replacement niche applications that were environment specific, figuring out how to do basic tasks that are simply different.
On that note, avoid committing to a specific environment unless your application really needs to squeeze out every cycle of performance. It's 2019 and we have portable options now for most application demands.
In which case, move home or somewhere else more to your liking? There's nothing inherently wrong with the way things work on Mac.
2. I've used Windows and macOS concurrently, and was always amazed at how bad the Windows experience was (though, yes, it has improved, and unfortunately, as alluded to by Gruber in his piece on the new MBP [1], Apple has paid too much attention to looks and not enough to functionality in the last half decade).
3. I found most "portable" options (eg Electron, qt, etc.) generally worse than native apps. Exceptions are pure CLI tools - they're great (use homebrew on the Mac to manage those!)
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2019/11/16-inch_macbook_pro_first...
There were other things (good-enough port selection complementing the high battery life and good trackpad to mean I could just grab my laptop and go for nearly any situation, without taking anything else, being high among them) but they're gone now. It's basically the software and the trackpad keeping me around. I'd rather use a "worse" Macbook specs-wise than a Win10 or Linux laptop that's much better on paper, because the experience will still suck far less. Design, "thinness", trendiness, all that, don't give a shit. Give me a brick of a Thinkpad with an Apple trackpad, official macOS support, and a 20% lower price than a MBP at same specs, and I'll take that option in a heartbeat.
would you agree with this change to your description?:
"Yes, you could get [better] hardware somewhere else..."
Chromebooks do offer better hardware per dollar than other computers, but you are (or perhaps were) pretty locked-into the ChromeOS, or at least none of the workarounds seemed palatable. So if you like ChromeOS then there is better value hardware out there, but Mac is it for the rest of us.
If it's just about running MacOS, they absolutely apply.
So no, I don't consider it the same. It's a great hack if you want a ton of power for a build machine, but otherwise... I'd rather pay the financial cost up front and just be done with it.
There are nothing else making the macbook lines worth it. If Linux with hardware manufacturer come up with a standard for greater touchbar control, the mac will be out of circulation in no time.
I've noted this in a few other comments here but there's more to it than just the base computing system. Apple products as an ecosystem dwarf whatever you'd cobble together in some homegrown Linux-based setup, and Windows in general just feels... really messy, like there's no clear consensus on how the ecosystem should work.
Every software company I've worked in building websites/webapps (Ruby, Python, Java, HTML/CSS/JS/React/whatever etc.) tends to issue their developers with MBPs. None of them need to do so for Xcode to build Mac/iOS apps. A few people may opt for Lenovos running Linux, but they're a distinct minority who really likes compiling their own tiling window manager from scratch etc.
Why MBP as standard? Because you get a reasonably stable Unix box that also runs commercial business and productivity software (Office, video conference stuff), and the Adobe suite for the front-end/creative folks.
Windows is going after that with WSL. Linux is going after that with, err, GNU/Freedom I guess?
Writing Python/Ruby/JavaScript/Java/Go/Elixir/whatever hot new shiny, in Atom or Vim or VSCode, is about as easy on Linux as it is on Mac (and it is getting better on Windows with WSL). But when you've got to use some awful video conferencing corporate crapware, there's at least some chance it'll work on a Mac in a way it won't on Linux.
