That’s so wild to me - my personal laptop is still a Mac but I’m in windows all day for work. Some of the new direction of macOS isn’t awesome but the basics are still rock solid. Touchpad is perfect, sleep works 100% of the time for days on end, still has UNIX underneath.
Same boat, and 100% agree. I couldn’t find a single example of Windows or Windows software where I think the experience is in any way better. Windows only saving grace, as a developer, is WSL.
For a simple example, no app remembers the last directory you were working in. The keys each app uses are completely inconsistent from app to app. And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor. Then there’s the Windows 95-style dialog boxes mixed in with the Windows 11-style dialog boxes; what a UI mess. I spoke with one vendor the other day who was actually proud they’d adopted a ribbon interface in their UI “just like Office” and I verbally laughed.
From a hardware perspective, I still don’t understand why Windows and laptop manufacturers can’t get sleep working right. My Intel MacBook Pro with an old battery still sleeps and wakes and lasts for several hours, while my new Windows laptop lasts about an hour and won’t wake from hibernate half the time without a hard reboot.
I think Windows is the “good enough” for most people.
> I don't think the automation options in MacOS are better than AutoHotKey (even Linux doesn't have something as good).
Did you try Keyboard Maestro https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ (I've never used AutoHotKey and I'd be super curious if there are deficiencies in KM relative to it, but Keyboard Maestro is, from my perspective, a masterpiece, it's hard to imagine it being any better.)
Also I think this statement needs a stronger defense given macOS includes Shortcuts, Automator, and AppleScript, I don't know much about Windows automation but I've never heard of them having something like AppleScript (that can say, migrate data between applications without using GUI scripting [e.g., iterate through open browser tabs and create todos from each of them operating directly on the application data rather than scripting the UI]).
Yeah, the things that AppleScript can do is so crazy.
I've fully automated keeping 1 tab in Chrome logged into a website that insists on logging me out every hour or something. (not banking or anything)
Mac also can't get sleep right. Have you tried to make a macbook consistently be 'awake' when the lid is closed?
You can't, really. Almost everyone resorts to buying an HDMI dongle to fake a display. Apple solved the problem at such a low level, the flexibility to run something in clamshell mode is broken, even when using caffeine/amphetamine/etc etc etc.
So, tradeoffs. They made their laptops go to sleep very well, but broke functionality in the process. You can argue it's a good tradeoff, just acknowledge that there WAS a tradeoff made.
I did for years too, but newer MacBooks no longer allow running with lid-closed unless connected to a monitor, I was disappointed to recently learn this.
If I’m wrong, someone tell me how to do it! On an M4 MacBook Air running latest OSX release.
I don’t mean this to sound like I’m being a jerk, but why would I want my MacBook to be awake with the lid closed? If I want it to be awake doing something, I leave the lid open and let the screen sleep. Maybe I’ve been using a Mac too long, but lid closed means sleep to me. I’ll even do that when I have it plugged into a monitor: close the lid to make it sleep.
> And it was only in Windows 11 that Windows started remembering my window configuration when I plugged and unplugged a monitor.
Oh god, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and switch to 11, huh?
The one thing that has been saving me from throwing my PC out the window in rage has been the monitor I have that supports a "keep alive" mode where switching inputs is transparent to the computers connected to it. So when switching inputs between my PC and laptop neither one thinks the monitor is being disconnected/reconnected. If it wasn't for that, I'd be screaming "WHY ARE YOU MOVING ALL MY WINDOWS?" on a regular basis. (Seriously, why are you moving all my windows? Sure, if they're on the display that was just disconnected, I get you. But when I connect a new display, Windows 10 seems to throw a dart at the display space for every window and shuffle them to new locations. Windows that live in a specific place on a specific display 100% of the time just fly around for no reason. Please god just stop.)
A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail). A number of others were affected by the same issue. There have been show-stopper bugs in the core functionality of Photos as well. I don't get the impression that the basics are Apple's focus with respect to software.
It’s not as if such bugs are unheard of for Windows users, and certainly not Linux users.
But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac, or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake, or a host of other problems you routinely have on both Windows and Linux.
I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.
To compare Apples to apples, you'd have to look at a Framework computer and agree that wifi is going to work out of the box... but here I'm meeting you on a much weaker argument: "Apple's software basics are /not/ rock solid, but other platforms have issues too"
> I haven't heard about surprise-your-files-are-deleted bugs in core programs of other systems. That's a bigger show-stopper in my opinion.
I don't find your original anecdote convincing:
> A friend of mine lost a ton of messages when upgrading the OS (and therefore Mail).
E.g., what does this mean? They lost mail messages? How did they verify they had those messages before and after? E.g., file-system operations? GUI search? How much do they know about how Mail app stores message (e.g., I used to try understand this decades ago, but I expect today messages aren't even necessarily always stored locally)? How are you syncing mail messages, e.g., using native IMAP, or whatever Gmail uses, or Exchange? What's the email backend?
E.g. without deeper evidence this sounds more like a mail message indexing issue rather than a mail-messages-stored-on-disk-issue (in 2025, I'd personally have zero expectations about how Mail manages messages on disk, e.g., I'd expect local storage of message to be dynamically managed like most applications that aren't document-based use a combination of cloud functionality and local caching, e.g., found this in a quick search https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/471801/ensure-maco...), but if you have stronger evidence I'd love to hear it. But as presented your extrapolating much stronger conclusions than are warranted by the anecdote in my opinion.
Mail deleted a large number of messages but not all of them. It was stored in files (which were smaller on disk, so not an indexing issue) and recovery required loading snapshots from Time Machine, converting to a format Thunderbird could import and transitioning to that.
You've only addressed something like 30% of the issues I asked about (although I'm honestly impressed you got that far), e.g., I wouldn't call Apple Mail an application designed to managed a collection of emails on disk. Isn't the important question here whether the emails were still stored on the server? E.g., or were they using POP?
I've been using Mac OS since 10.3 and, whilst it's better now, I've had a memorable number of of wifi connection bugs. And ISTR issues with waking from sleep, but that might have been before the Intel migration. It's never been immune from bugs.
> But I’ve certainly never struggled with getting WiFi to work on a Mac
I want to be able to set different networking options (manual DNS, etc) for different wifi networks, but as far as I can tell, I can only set them per network interface.
There's something like "locations" but last time I tried using that, the entire System Settings.app slowed to a crawl / beachballed until I managed to turn it back off.
> or struggled with getting it to sleep/wake
My m1 MBP uses something like 3-5% of its battery per hour while sleeping, because something keeps waking it up. I tried some app that is designed to help you diagnose the issue but came up empty-handed.
... but yes on both counts, it's light years better than my last experience with Linux, even on hardware that's supposed to have fantastic support (thinkpads).
I come back to my work MBP M2 dead almost everyday and I have to leave it charged or wait 15 minutes for Mac to decide that it is okay to boot even when the power has been connected.
In my case it works roughly ~50% of the time. Probably because of the Thunderbolt monitor connected to power it, idk.
> the basics are still rock solid
The basics like the OS flat out refusing to provide you any debugging information on anything going wrong? It's rock solid allright. I had an issue where occasionally I would get an error "a USB device is using too much power, try unplugging it and replugging it." Which device? Why the hell would Apple tell you that, where is the fun in that?
Key remapping requires installing a keylogger, nor can you have a different scroll direction between mouse and touchpad. There still isn't window management which for the sizes of modern monitors is quite constraining.
> still has UNIX underneath
A very constrained UNIX. A couple of weeks ago I wanted to test something (pkcs11-tool signing with a software HSM), and turns out that Apple has decided that libraries can only be loaded from a number of authorised locations which can only be accessed while installing an application. You can't just use a dynamic library you're linking to, it has to be part of a wider install.
I've been primarily on a Macbook for the past three years, after almost 10 years using Chromebooks as my primary machines (yay work at Google). Until 2015, I had been a rabid defender of Thinkpads (T-series, mostly), and used Windows at work and Linux (mostly Kubuntu) at home, from around 2009-2015.
Long story short, I was very happy with the "it just works" of ChromeOS, and only let down by the lack of support for some installed apps I truly needed in my personal life. I tried a Mac back in 2015 but couldn't get used to how different it was, and it felt very bulky compared to ChromeOS and much slower than the Linux machine I'd had, so I switched to a Pixelbook as was pretty content.
Fast forward to 2023 when I needed to purchase a new personal laptop. I'd bought my daughter a Pixelbook Go in 2021 and my son a Lenovo x1 Carbon at the same time. Windows was such a dumpster fire I absolutely ruled it out, and since I could run all the apps I needed on ChromeOS it was between Linux & Mac. I decided to try a Mac again, for both work & personal, and I've been a very happy convert ever since.
My M2 Pro has been rock solid, and although I regret choosing to upgrade to Sequoia recently, it still makes me feel better than using Windows. M4 Pro for work is amazingly performant and I still can't get over the battery efficiency. The nicest thing, imho, is that the platform has been around long enough for a mature & vibrant ecosystem of quality-of-life utilities to exist at this point, so even little niggles (like why do I need the Scroll Reverser app at all?) are easy to deal with, and all my media editing apps are natively available.
The basics are not rock solid. Even a core feature such as remote management crashes and freezes every 5 minutes when you connect from a non-apple machine, many have reported this over years but Apple just does Apple. Safari is still atrocious when it comes to web api supports. The worst part is, with Apple, we do not know if these are intentional anti-competitive barriers or actual software bugs. I purchased a mac mini simply to compile apps via xcode and can say the core experience is MUCH more buggy than a fresh Windows or Ubuntu install.
Edit: Hard to call intentionally preventing support for web apis a power user thing. This creates more friction for basic users trying to use any web app.
Edit2: lol Apple PR must be all over this, went from +5 to -1 in a single refresh. Flagged for even criticizing what they intentionally break.
Safari adds hours of battery life due to its hyper focus on power consumption. The level to which web API standards are affected is rather immaterial to me. I imagine we’re different consumers though.
Adds hours of battery life to the expense of making your microphone input completely inaudible due to throttling if you background the tab it's running on.
On iOS you cannot even keep a web app running in the background. The second they mutlitask, even with an audio/microphone active, Apple kills it. Are they truly adding battery life or are they cheating by creating restrictions that prevent apps from working?
Being able to conduct a voice call through the browser seems like a pretty basic use case to me.
Breaking things is not extending battery life. Battery life assumes functionality. Breaking functionality to extend it is a scapegoat and the break-whatever-you-want could be provided as a mode instead of one-size fits all, we don't care what breaks approach.
Why would you want to support web APIs? They're all just Google proposing 5000 new ways for advertisers to fingerprint you but doing it through "standards".
Nice strawman. The core of webapis is about opening up lower level functionality from the sandbox/accessibility of the web. Beyond audio and video IO, there's great stuff coming with webgpu and webNN. Web apps are much safer and much more convenient than downloading an app, well in theory they could be if support wasn't regularly sabotaged to protect a corporate interest in walled gardens.
If we dismiss remote management as a non-core feature shouldn't we consider installing a new browser to be advanced usage as well?
I understand that this post is about MacOS, but yes, we are forced to support Safari for iOS. Many of these corporate decisions to prevent web apps from functioning properly spill over from MacOS Safari to iOS Safari.
