After 30 years of Windows... I'm switching to Apple Mac OS

[aeberbach]

Except that you care enough to tell us you don't care...

[DiTBho]

I didn't like Apple's "walled garden" approach

the "open garden approach" of PCs offers apparent and illusory freedom, often used to make you buy a PC, but in fact it's nothing but polluted by tons of technically bad choices that become standard "de facto", to make you buy a PC.

[Halcyon]

1 Week Update

Overall, I'm impressed and suitably happy.

In terms of the actual build quality, look and feel of the device, it's pretty hard to beat. Very few laptops are designed as nice as the current MacBook models. Small little touches such as the way the display "feels" when you open and close it really give it a premium quality. As I bought the fan-less MacBook Air, there are no openings to get clogged with dust (which was a bit of an issue with my ThinkPad and required vacuuming every now and then). The seperate MagSafe charging port is nice, but you can also charge via USB-C if desired. My only minor gripe (which is common across all metal-bodied MacBook's I've used) is that when plugged into the mains via the included power adapter and MagSafe cable, you do get a little bit of that "tingle" when using the TouchPad. For some people, that might be distracting.

One of the things that seriously impressed me was the audio; hands down the best speakers I've ever listened to in a laptop and the slim size makes it equally as impressive. There is actually a decent amount of low-to-mid frequency response and the volume is very adequate. No noticeable distortion or rattles either. If you're the type of user that likes to watch videos/movies on your laptop, you won't be disappointed.

The LCD display is also lovely and sharp (on-par with my 4K Lenovo ThinkVision display) although despite being a 15" LCD, the native resolution is "only" 1710x1107. For some people this might be a little large in appearance, however it will go all the way up to 2880x1864 and seems to scale quite well while maintaining clarity. It has no problem driving the built-in LCD and my external monitor (at 3840x2160) however I mostly keep the lid closed and use the single monitor while "docked". Transitioning between a single external display and an "extended" display is quick and seamless (unlike Windows where you have to give it a moment to it to re-arrange/re-size things).

I'm still getting used to MacOS, for example, I'm forever pressing CTRL+C instead of Command-C etc... I'm sure it can be changed, I just haven't looked yet. I did tweak the UI a little bit. I found the default setting of the "dock" at the bottom of the screen too large and obtrusive by default, but that can all be changed (or hidden completely). I actually don't mind the dock. I much prefer it over the native "Launchpad" application. I mostly use either the dock for launching my frequent applications, or the Spotlight Search function. Most settings and items are in logical places, I only had to Google a couple of things.

In terms of performance, for the most part it's snappy and responsive. I have encountered some minor slow downs in the UI but it typically picks back up again very quickly. I have two user profiles that are both usually logged in with applications running in the background. Switching between them is easy but there is a little bit of a delay. At the moment, with a reasonable amount of things open/running, I'm using a little over 12 GB of the 16 GB RAM in this unit. I haven't encountered any issues with running out of memory (yet), however if you're considering the 8 GB version, you may run into some dramas. (I have used the current base model of the iMac and even with a relatively small number of applications running, it would throw up low memory messages.)

On the topic of performance, I did notice that the CPU while being 8 cores, it split between 4 "performance" and 4 "efficiency" cores. I'm not exactly sure how they differ, but I'm presuming that most of the time, it's ticking along using the 4 more efficient cores to get the long battery life. I wouldn't say I've really pushed this machine hard yet as I've mostly only been using it for video playback and office applications.

Initial set-up was relatively quick and easy. You're given the option to create an Apple ID, but you also get the option to skip this step entirely. I did run into a few problems where certain options didn't turn on properly without any indications of anything being "wrong". Those were the "Find my Mac" and the "Advanced Data Protection" (end-to-end encryption) functions of the iCloud account. When I went to enable them, they would either do nothing, or pop up with a dialog box saying that some other options needed to be changed, but clicking continue didn't do anything. I eventually found out after an hour of tinkering that by adding my YubiKey's as a second factor of authentication, both options enabled properly (even though I had my phone as an MFA option). I'll chop that up to minor UI bugginess. This was on MacOS Ventura 13.4.1, maybe it's been fixed in 13.5?

There is also a little bit of bloatware that comes with MacOS, some of which can be easily removed, while some can't. For example, Apple TV, Podcasts, News and Stock market applications are things I'll never use but seem to be system applications and don't have the option to remove them.

Finally, the battery life is probably the most impressive part of this machine. I was watching The Office in full screen last night and the battery was still sitting at 100% after one full 30 minute episode. I'm travelling later this week with limited opportunities to charge during the day, so that will be a good test of how much I can get done on a single charge.

[brucehoult]

I'm still getting used to MacOS, for example, I'm forever pressing CTRL+C instead of Command-C etc... I'm sure it can be changed

Don't change it! I'm constantly switching between Mac and Linux terminals on the same machine / keyboard. It's not a problem, I automatically know by context which to use where -- don't even have to think about it.

In fact it's even better, because lots of the emacs/bash/readline keystrokes work everywhere in MacOs as well as the Mac keystrokes e.g. C-a / C-e to go to the start and end of the line, C-k to cut to the end of the line, and C-y to paste. Works in the web browser I'm typing this in, in Terminal.app, in any dialog box e.g. that Spotlight search box you mentioned ...

On the topic of performance, I did notice that the CPU while being 8 cores, it split between 4 "performance" and 4 "efficiency" cores. I'm not exactly sure how they differ

Roughly speaking, I put the efficiency cores as worth about as much as hypedthreading on Intel chips. i.e. all four efficiency cores put together give less performance than one performance core. Doing 'make -j8' is going to be lucky to cut build times by 20% best case, compared to `make -j4` -- and usually a lot less.

[Someone]

My only minor gripe (which is common across all metal-bodied MacBook's I've used) is that when plugged into the mains via the included power adapter and MagSafe cable, you do get a little bit of that "tingle" when using the TouchPad. For some people, that might be distracting.

Past adaptors were hybrid Class I and Class II depending on which mains plug was attached to the adaptor, the long "extension" cable had the mains earth connected through and eliminated that tingle.

Finally, the battery life is probably the most impressive part of this machine. I was watching The Office in full screen last night and the battery was still sitting at 100% after one full 30 minute episode. I'm travelling later this week with limited opportunities to charge during the day, so that will be a good test of how much I can get done on a single charge.

The battery meter will lie at the high end and doesn't match accurately to remaining time. But video decode when offloaded to the hard silicon decoders is very light on power.

[Halcyon]

It's been just under 2 months now and I can't see myself going back to anything other than MacOS now. This doesn't mean I've bought into the whole "Apple ecosystem" as I'm still very much an Android user (and still don't see that changing anytime soon, unless iOS miraculously gets less irritating and inflexible).

The transition has been seamless and aside from some minor UI glitches, I'm absolutely loving the simplicity and having things "just work" the moment I open my laptop lid. Since buying this, aside from initial OS updates, I haven't had to reboot this machine at all. Sleep/hibernate modes work (almost) seamlessly.  I say "almost" as there is a bug in the current version of MacOS which means that for users that use multiple user profiles (one for work, work for personal) and dock/undock external displays all the time, "new" resolutions aren't pushed into effect across every user (it needs a close/open) of the laptop display.

Anyone who has used Linux for a decent amount of time is fully versed with all the glitches and issues that brings with updates, broken packages, drivers etc... As much as I love Linux, I don't have time for that shit. So much so, I'm actually considering buying a Mac desktop machine. I'm just waiting to see what Apple does with their iMac and whether they'll go to the M2 or (as rumours have it) Apple will release their iMacs with the updates M3 chip.

The lack of "charge anxiety" is also a very welcome change. I've been travelling interstate for over 2 weeks now and have probably plugged this machine in 2 to 3 times at most just to top up the battery. It's never dipped below 50%.

[Marco]

the "open garden approach" of PCs offers apparent and illusory freedom, often used to make you buy a PC, but in fact it's nothing but polluted by tons of technically bad choices that become standard "de facto", to make you buy a PC.

It's the source of all hardware and software innovation, period. Even now in its dying days, Apple does nothing but take the innovation from PC tarnished by lack of competent ecosystem (Microsoft is dysfunctional, Google is polluted by datamining and some poor initial choices in Android licensing) and perfects it.

The freedom is very real and once it's gone, it will become a very sad and boring environment. It will also hasten the death of easily available electronics components, who needs distrubutors when you are begging for some alms from a single vertically integrated manufacturer which rules the entire consumer electronic ecosystem?

PS. I don't think vertical integration is necessary to compete, Microsofts near complete anarchy while it did spawn massive innovation is no longer tenable, but Chromebooks as a model for hardware/OS development works really well. Shame the focus on datamining drags it down and keeps it low end.

[John B]

Well keep us in the loop as to which desktop solution you go for, it sounds like either the iMac or the mini. Personally I think laptops or other mobile devices are apples strength. Their desktop offerings are a net negative. The baseline reasonable priced units are woefully lacking in ram and storage, upgrading them is poor value for money, higher tiered CPUs have the same issue and upgrading them puts you in sky high budget territory.

[bd139]

Nice to see another convert. Once you Mac you don’t go back.

Someone mentioned desktop solutions. I’ve got an M1 14” MBP, the base model, which is fine for me. This is plugged into a Studio Display and used with a BT keyboard (Apple Magic Keyboard) and mouse (Logitech MX master 3). Gives you the flexibility of both.

Regarding RAM and storage, it works a little different at least in the RAM department and can’t be compared to windows at all. I could get by with an 8Gb machine fine. In fact I had an ass end M1 Mac mini for ages which never had any problems with anything other than Lightroom and they fixed that now.

My workload is not EE stuff though. It’ll quite happily run kicad and LTspice though which is good enough for a lot of work. Mine is a Maxima, LaTeX, admin and photography machine really.

Idealisms aside it works and doesn’t fuck me around.

[Halcyon]

Well keep us in the loop as to which desktop solution you go for, it sounds like either the iMac or the mini. Personally I think laptops or other mobile devices are apples strength. Their desktop offerings are a net negative. The baseline reasonable priced units are woefully lacking in ram and storage, upgrading them is poor value for money, higher tiered CPUs have the same issue and upgrading them puts you in sky high budget territory.

Yeh I tend to agree, even their baseline laptops are really lacking, but, there are always those who will pay for the absolute bare minimum and to be honest, the performance of the current laptops, even with the smallest and slower SSD drive is perfectly fine. 8GB RAM is suitable for most basic users, particularly as MacOS (and also Windows 10/11 I believe?) makes use of compression in RAM. I went with 16 GB (as I tend to use a lot of applications at the same time) and also the faster 512 GB SSD.

I'll definitely let you know what I decide to do with the desktop. At the moment, I'm docking my laptop to a Lenovo 4K monitor and it works perfectly fine, but I would hate to have my laptop lost/damage/go faulty and not have a suitable backup.

[aeberbach]

the "open garden approach" of PCs offers apparent and illusory freedom, often used to make you buy a PC, but in fact it's nothing but polluted by tons of technically bad choices that become standard "de facto", to make you buy a PC.

It's the source of all hardware and software innovation, period. Even now in its dying days, Apple does

Dying days eh? Feels like I’ve been reading that Apple is doomed since the Apple II. So what is it this time that will destroy the world’s most valuable company?

[Marco]

A trillion dollar company could wait for you to finish reading the entire post before defending it. It's not logical to assume I was talking about Apple.

I replied to this :

the "open garden approach" of PCs offers apparent and illusory freedom

Later in the post I said :

The freedom is very real and once it's gone

So, I was clearly talking about PC dying.

[David Hess]

... After giving Windows 8/10/11 years of attention, I've come to the conclusion that it's all entirely rubbish and Microsoft have lost the plot. Everything from ... to stupid decisions essentially forcing people to use Microsoft's cloud environment, or ...

Do you think that was not deliberate?

Microsoft has been removing features from Windows which become a performance drag with cloud storage compared to local storage, when this was a solved problem more than a decade ago for those of us who were using local storage.  For example the status bar which reports free space on the currently selected drive, and sortable folder sizes.

Unfortunately Apple is no better, and could be argued to have started it, although it is an old business practice.

I don't find Apple's hardware that expensive actually, unless you compare it with entry-level cheap PC crap.

I build my own systems with lots of ECC RAM and local storage at perhaps 10% the cost of an equivalent Apple system, if such even existed.

[aeberbach]

I was wrong, but it seems even more bizarre to talk about “PC” as a thing that ever could die. It can slowly morph into something else (as it has always done) but it is never going away.

[David Hess]

I was wrong, but it seems even more bizarre to talk about “PC” as a thing that ever could die. It can slowly morph into something else (as it has always done) but it is never going away.

With the needs of so many consumers met by tablets and phones and game consoles, I think the PC market will move back toward catering to enthusiasts and businesses, like the personal computer market during the time of CP/M and early ISA.

Will that be enough to sustain personal computer development as it exists now?  No, but hopefully some of the development costs will be shared with other markets as is the case now anyway.  And if that does not happen, then ARM will become the next PC processor, except that requires someone other than Apple to produce ARM based PCs.

[Marco]

I was wrong, but it seems even more bizarre to talk about “PC” as a thing that ever could die. It can slowly morph into something else (as it has always done) but it is never going away.

The openness of PCs was driven by the happenstance combination of DOS/Windows running on kitbashed computers because IBM screwed up on one hand and servers demanding relative openness of hardware to run various operating systems on the other.

Apple is vertically integrated and cloud is becoming vertically integrated as well. Apple can never provide a path for open PCs to survive, the Asahi linux people are either completely delusional or are intentionally divide and conquering for Apple. Apple will at some point start having encrypted code, what's left then for Asahi to reverse engineer? Even with Asahi Linux, there is no diversified market for the hardware.

There are three ways I can see PCs surviving :
- Microsoft gets back into mobile phones and embraces the Chromebook model of platform development.
- Google splits off advertising and starts using the Chromebook model for mobile phones too.
- Governments splits Apple/Google up and disallows consumer electronic ecosystems under control of a single company.

Ignoring government for a moment, the future of consumer electronics is highly integrated ecosystems with centralized quality control ... I'd prefer that control to be handled through relatively open Chromebook type development, but if it isn't it will be closed by Apple.

[SilverSolder]

With the emergence of cloud services and now resource hungry AI, we have gone full circle and are back to the old time mainframe days.  Today, our PCs basically act like terminals for centralized resources, and we pay through the nose for them via subscriptions.

I wonder if the pendulum could swing back again at some point, where a new generation of PCs become powerful enough to run local and secure services including AI at an overall attractive total cost of ownership for various purposes, compared to the dozens of cloud subs required to run a full suite of applications these days?

[Marco]

And if that does not happen, then ARM will become the next PC processor, except that requires someone other than Apple to produce ARM based PCs.

APIs are infinitely more important to provide portability between platforms than ISAs ... and Apple uses their own for that. Apple using ARM creates near zero incentive to use ARM any where else. Even the optimizations for their compiler will hardly carry.

x86 is not inherently a problem either, battery life is a system design issue. There were cheap Chromebooks doing 12+ hour browsing/video many years ago. The Windows PC simply has too little central quality control and branding consistency, almost everyone compromises for benchmark performance and battery life is an afterthought ... because it works best for advertising the individual laptop, even when it's disastrous for the Windows brand.

[SiliconWizard]

I don't find Apple's hardware that expensive actually, unless you compare it with entry-level cheap PC crap.

I build my own systems with lots of ECC RAM and local storage at perhaps 10% the cost of an equivalent Apple system, if such even existed.

Yeah, my comment above was more about the laptops, which are not *that* much more expensive than *similar*-quality and performance PC laptops, which get pretty expensive too.

Now things get rather different with "desktop" solutions. The Mac Studio line is already a bit expensive for the specs, although they pack a lot of power in a small package with relatively low power consumption.
A decently powerful desktop PC with quality components will also be in the $2K range easily.

Things start getting really unreasonable with their Mac Pro line - it's probably the closest to what you are talking about here, and yes prices are really, really high.
But getting a similarly spec'ed system at 10% of the price of a Mac Pro? If you're buying used parts, yes (but then comparing used stuff with brand new stuff is not reasonable). If you're building one with only new parts, it's not likely. Maybe more around 25%-30% or something like that - still much more affordable, admittedly.

And yes, the Mac Pro used to have models with Xeon CPUs and ECC RAM. The new models seem to be based on the M2 only, although I'm not 100% sure - maybe the Xeon-based ones are still in the catalog. If someone knows the Apple offering better than I do, they can confirm or not.

[Clear as mud]

I was clearly talking about PC dying.

Sorry, but it's not clear at all for those of us who pay attention to English grammar.  Any sentence starting with "Even now in its dying days, Apple ..." is clearly talking about Apple dying, no matter what the rest of the sentence says.  And if the rest of the sentence contradicts the first part that says Apple is dying, it becomes very hard to read and the grammar-nazi reader is left wondering if you even know what you're talking about at all.

[Marco]

Perhaps, but you should really show it through logic and argument.

It is my observation that the people most convinced of Apple's advantages are the most vehemently opposed when I point out they are heading to monopoly status.

[brucehoult]

Now things get rather different with "desktop" solutions. The Mac Studio line is already a bit expensive for the specs, although they pack a lot of power in a small package with relatively low power consumption.
A decently powerful desktop PC with quality components will also be in the $2K range easily.

Things start getting really unreasonable with their Mac Pro line - it's probably the closest to what you are talking about here, and yes prices are really, really high.
But getting a similarly spec'ed system at 10% of the price of a Mac Pro? If you're buying used parts, yes (but then comparing used stuff with brand new stuff is not reasonable). If you're building one with only new parts, it's not likely. Maybe more around 25%-30% or something like that - still much more affordable, admittedly.

The Mac Pro, and now Mac Studio, are good value if you need the things that are in them, such as powerful GPUs and masses of fast I/O.

As a programmer, not a video editor or animator, I don't need that stuff -- I just need a fast CPU and a decent amount of RAM with some kind of video card that can throw a lot of high quality text up on a 4K screen and enough GPU to play YouTube (and Zoom...). And a TB or so of storage, but it doesn't need to be stupidly fast.

Way back when (2010) my then employer kindly supplied me with a top of the line 8 core 2.26 GHz Mac Pro to use to build their code (Firefox). It was pretty damn expensive. And, sadly, enough of the build process is single-threaded that it wasn't particularly fast.  I built my own quad core i7-860, Hackintoshed it, and overclocked it from 2.8 to 3.4 GHz and it was a lot faster than the Mac Pro FOR BUILDING SOFTWARE.  And cost a lot less too.

Six months later Apple came out with an iMac with the same CPU. That would be perfect for my needs, except 1) I already had the ugly PC tower, and 2) the iMac came wth an amazing super high quality 27" screen which is great, except that every time you get a new iMac you have to pay for a new screen. At that time I had an Apple 30" 2560x1600 screen which I'd bought 2nd hand and used with a series of different computers for nearly ten years.

When the i7-4790K came out I built a Hackintosh using one of those. And .. six months later Apple came out with an iMac with the same CPU.

Same story when I built my next machine (reusing case and power supply and ...) using an i7-6700K.  Six months later Apple made an iMac using it.

And so on ... Apple has even sold iMacs with 8 and 10 core i9s, though by that stage my custom PC was a 32 core 2990wx ThreadRipper (which I use to this day).

In Core2Duo days you could buy Apple's fastest CPU in Mac Mini form. That's perfect for me. As easy to transport as a laptop, but much cheaper. Plug it into whatever screen you want, wherever you are.

But as we got into i7s the Mac Mini fell behind (and NUC wasn't any better).


With Apple Silicon, you can again get Mac Mini with pretty fast CPUs.

I'm still using (and typing this on) an original November 2020 4+4 core Mac Mini with 16 GB RAM. But you can now get a Mac Mini with up to 12 cores (8 performance plus 4 efficiency), which makes a pretty decent developer machine. With 32 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD that comes to $2199. Getting the same specs in a laptop needs a 14" MBP for $2899.

Or, incidentally, a base Mac Studio with the same CPU and RAM and SSD is $2199 exactly the same as the high end Mac Mini. But you can also double the CPU to an M2 Ultra with 16 performance cores (and 8 efficiency), in which case you can up the RAM to 128 GB or 192 GB. That does start to get a bit eye-watering -- $4799 with 128 GB RAM.

[Someone]

The Mac Pro, and now Mac Studio, are good value if you need the things that are in them, such as powerful GPUs and masses of fast I/O.

As a programmer, not a video editor or animator, I don't need that stuff

The benchmark punters think the integrated GPUs are underpowered... so its a middle ground.

Trashcan pro's started the push from apple to [forcibly] include significant GPU compute where people would otherwise not choose it, the intention being software would find uses for the resource. Now that the product line is all apple silicon that should speed up. AI deployment is already able to run on any of the CPU/GPU/Neural Engine. Software engineering seems to be the bottleneck (try hiring people with experience in scaleable parallel processing) so some more platform independent APIs to abstract that away will probably be the tipping point for more general uses.

Chicken and Egg. No-one will write GPU compute software while the market is fragmented and diverse. Apple putting a scaled, yet consistent, GPU (and Neural Compute) resource into all their products provides a juicy market ready to go.

[brucehoult]

Chicken and Egg. No-one will write GPU compute software while the market is fragmented and diverse. Apple putting a scaled, yet consistent, GPU (and Neural Compute) resource into all their products provides a juicy market ready to go.

I think GPU compute is a dead end. As a programmer I'm far more interested in scalable vector (RISC-V RVV, Arm SVE) than GPGPU. All the CUDA/OpenCL code ports straight over, but can be far more integrated with normal CPU code, without all that tedious copying things back and forth.

[Someone]

Chicken and Egg. No-one will write GPU compute software while the market is fragmented and diverse. Apple putting a scaled, yet consistent, GPU (and Neural Compute) resource into all their products provides a juicy market ready to go.

I think GPU compute is a dead end. As a programmer I'm far more interested in scalable vector (RISC-V RVV, Arm SVE) than GPGPU. All the CUDA/OpenCL code ports straight over, but can be far more integrated with normal CPU code, without all that tedious copying things back and forth.

The average user doesn't care what architecture or processing paradigm is under the hood, they just want it faster and cheaper. Given the unified memory of the M series and its exceptional bandwidth, highly parallel compute units become more attractive than trying to make wider instructions on fewer cores.