A great example is the gaming PC vs gaming console war. PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games. They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.
People are just too eager to jump on behalf on Apple - "but why you would rather not do this instead" (Why? Because I was looking for something else and I mentioned it for heaven's sake!) and these hacks and workarounds stack up while "Apple products and services just work" stays where it was in such Apple users' imaginations.
This is frustratingly weird and quite niche to Apple's user-fans.
For instance Apple's online services - the whole iCloud charade is a living and growing mess.
The SMS sync between phone and mac and in fact difference of basic UX options ("you can't select multiple messages on Catalina Messages app - not sure if it is added in later versions -- if you delete an SMS on phone it will still be synced to your mac Messages). And there apps are opaque in the guise of "simplicity" you just end up getting frustrated. I can go on for hours. Now as an Apple fan - but why would you not want those SMS to sync to mac as well? Yes, even if you delete them! What's the use of multiple message selection on mac Messages app - that's bad use case! Yes, yes, even though it is supported on iPhone - you don't get it!
The problem is the essential duopoly - Android and iOS - rock and a hard place.
One guy is convinced that uninstalling Chrome is the solution.
The go-to first response is “run Etrecheck,” after which they’ll chastise you for having installed anything they don’t recognize. And god help you if you’ve installed CleanMyMac. The only solution is to reinstall macOS and never do that again!
(They all seem to ignore that CleanMyMac X is now notarized and sold in the App Store...)
Stackoverflow > Apple’s community support. Every time.
I've experience this first-hand, and it's annoying AF.
I wrote a post on Apple's forum about the years-old iOS celluar-draining bug[1], and one of these high-reputation "experts" (read: Apple apologist/shill) kept insisting that the OS corrupting its own settings and not handling the corruption gracefully was somehow all my fault - when I pointed out this was a clear OS bug (even linking to the Wikipedia definition for 'software bug'), his long-winded pushback reply boiled down to him essentially saying that "bugs aren't bugs". Beyond useless as a help forum with these clowns being allowed to earn those "reputation" points.
Fuck the apple forums, they are usefulness. I'd like to add another type: return to apple for repairs alongside the 'reinstall os'.
There's gotta be a better answer than reinstalling the os! That's a nuclear option that should be a last resort. But it's recommended all the time.
Linux is even worse, where even basic stuff such as suspend to disk or 3D acceleration regularly takes days or weeks worth of sifting through StackExchange posts, mailing lists, obscure blogs and 2010-era Debian Wiki posts.
And don't get me started on the clusterfuck that is Android. Got a new iPhone? No problem, transferring all the data is painless. Migrating in the Android world? Good luck getting even half of your stuff working.
Compared to all that, Apple is a fucking breeze to work with, because the competition is just mind bogglingly bad.
If you have an Intel or AMD GPU everything either just works, or works with the latest drivers (might require an added repo if the card came out after the last stable release).
Samsung-to-samsung: I can give anecdata only but moving to a new samsung phone was completely effortless. The only things that broke, broke because there was a newer android OS version on the target (not much of that). This would of course break (and maybe worse) on iPhone -> newer iPhone.
True. I’m fully into apple ecosystem with iMac, Apple tv, macbook and phones. So, naturally I use airdrop a lot, to the point that sometimes I depend on it to work. But, every few days it just stops working. Even after turning off Bluetooth, wifi on phone and mac it just doesn’t shows the device. Sometimes I just give up and sometimes when I don’t feel like giving up I go up to even restarting devices. This is something that I don’t expect from Apple.
Unfortunately no other home automation platform (Google, Amazon) lets you keep everything on your local network, and using Home Assistant would make using Siri for it harder, so I’m stuck with an annoyingly buggy platform.
Exactly the reason I keep dealing with HomeKit annoyances.
My last three MacBooks, including the new 16” M1, have inexplicably had issues syncing to iCloud for several days (sometimes weeks) until magically everything seems to just work as expected and I forget all about it.
It’s all part of the magic of owning Apple devices. They’re annoyances, but minor and usually easy enough to fix.
Not just a reflex, a cargo-cult reflex.
Look at the litany of optimization/debugging nonsense that is parroted across the internet. Registry fiddling, disabling Windows services, setting core affinities, divination by chicken bones, all sorts of nonsense - the impact of which is, of course, not ever empirically measured.
In Windows land? Decades can go by without anyone knowing what's going on, unless someone motivated enough to reverse engineer the binaries involved shows up and finds the issue. That isn't very common. Though when it happens it can be hilarious [1].
[1] https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
Then there was another game where I had to install a different DLL to get it to run.
Then there was IL2 Sturmovik that was just plain broken for a long time on more recent versions of Windows. I of course didn't discover this until after the refund window...
Like, manual transmission people think of the constant need to manage it yourself as just how driving is supposed to be.
It's a big problem in Linux, where things can totally break and nobody bats an eye.
I hate Linux for when things fall-apart. But I also know most of the things are being made by devs because of their passion. My hardware doesn't fail because Linux is blindly arrogant, but because of the hardware vendors who don't support the platform or me (as I paid them money)
Manual transmissions are an extra level of engagement that's fun to drive and useful in many casses. My 86bhp car lacks torque and power, specially combined with its heavy metal body. When I need to overtake and I lack the power for it I can downshift and pass. Add in the rev matching, and it makes it sweeter and perfect.
In a country like India, you pay a good price for a reliable automatic. So that's money saved.
It's the same difference as a home cooked meal and a takeout.
Apple doesn't get slack from me because they know the hardware, the software and still manage to mess it up with loyal fans defending their bad decisions
"Though initial iterations of the software for the original Xbox and Xbox 360 were based on heavily modified versions of Windows, the newer consoles feature operating systems that are highly compatible with Microsoft's desktop operating systems, allowing for shared applications and ease-of-development between personal computers and the Xbox line." Wikipedia
> and modular hardware
This is true. There are, e.g., fake GPUs that will make your experience quite bad. I always buy pre-build PCs from my favorite tech store, and I have personally avoided the problem. But Steam forums show that some people is not so fortunate. Also there is people trying to run modern games in very old PCs, consoles solve that problem by not running new games in previous generation consoles.
Honestly, it's plainly obvious that gaming on consoles is much more seamless than on PCs. If you don't think so, you're not recognizing all the little quirks you're dealing with on a PC. When was the last time a driver update broke a game on a console? Ever had to install support software to make a game work well with a particular controller? Issues with overlays and system feature integration? Unexpected performance loss due to a weird configuration? Mysterious DRM malfunction issues? Windows Update gone wrong? Those things (mostly) just don't happen on consoles because it's a much more controlled ecosystem.
I agree (I don't get why people downvotes). My argument is that a quality PC does not have that problems. The fact that you can get a very cheap PC creates many of this situations. But I get into "No true Scotsman" territory with that logic. And that is why I agree with your arguments.
That's the sort of thing that for the most part just doesn't happen with the consoles, because they're limited and tuned for the intended experience.
I've never had to deal with this on any console I've owned.
I agree that I have found that problems. I just get the same problems with my TV (Samsung) when I have several audio devices. Maybe one can argue that is a TV problem, not a console problem. But non-portable consoles need a TV to work. So, the problem exists but it's moved somewhere else.
After your comment I realize that portable consoles are that ideal all-in-one, at least older ones without HDMI or Bluetooth.
Happy 10th birthday T-530, 1 decade and still trucking!
Microsoft created its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to enable software to run across multiple Windows devices from desktops to tablets to consoles. It has not really been a resounding success, though it has some inconvenient limitations as well as business restrictions such as being tied to the Windows Store.
Even the Windows Store has moved away from UWP by supporting Win32 apps.
Which war was that? A bunch of teenagers and man-children arguing online between PC vs console superiority is in no way a 'war' and is anything but a great example for "workarounds become a reflex". Online squabbles between rabid fanboys and brand loyalists should be left alone and not be used in logical debates.
>PC gamers often seem to refuse to admit there's untold little quirks you have to deal with when using a general-purpose operating system and modular hardware to play games.
I highly doubt your broad generalization is accurate. Do you have any sources for your claims? Every PC owner and gamer I know both online and IRL openly admits this hobby is not a smooth sailing endeavor. Again, I would love to see your sources for your claims, otherwise I feel HN is degrading into reddit where people make broad fact-less generalizations with no arguments and others upvote regardless because it gives them self-approval and dopamine hits.
>They don't notice the workarounds they are continuously employing, because it's become a reflex.
My personal example would be MacOS, when I, an outsider who never regularly used MacOS, point out various UX quirks that trip me up and cause issues for me rather than make my life easier as I was promised, I saw that everyone I know who is a long time user of MacOS got so used to the quirks that they formed some workarounds that turned into reflexes and just became part of the experience and not viewed as issue anymore but as tolerated and expected behavior. Basically for them MacOS is simpler because they already know the quirks and workarounds inside and out, not because it's objectively simpler than the alternatives. Same goes for long time users of Linux and Windows if you're coming from the other side.
So in the end it's not about one being objectively better than the other, it's about people always will have more issues with the things they don't know very well and be subjectively biased towards the things they already know and like. It's the nature of humanity.
