Mind Dump, Tech And Life Blog
written by Ivan Alenko
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posted at 14. Aug '19
last updated at 24. Aug '21

Apple - being “special” - advantages and disadvantages

Using Macbook Pro from Apple has it’s own advantages ad disadvantages.

Advantages:

  • Build quality is really top
  • 4xUSB-C ports and ability to connect power cable to any of them
  • I love aluminium case
  • The display is the best in market. No more shitty dim panels like in older ThinkPads
  • Silent - fan doesn’t really run unless I play games (haha, gaming on Mac)
  • Light and portable
  • Speakers have good placement and sound
  • Touchpad is very comfortable
  • Free applications from Apple are OK
  • User experience of OS is comfortable
  • brew package manager to install mostly open source software
  • Stable OS
  • I have a feeling the system fucks me over much less than Windows 10
  • Is reasonably compatible with Unix
  • iCloud is not mandadtory and can be ignored
  • you don’t even need an account, xcode can be installed via homebrew
  • You don’t see iCloud everywhere like OneDrive, also macOS doesn’t download Candy Crush saga like Windows 10
  • also you don’t have broken 3D acceleration for 9 months, because there are conficts in Debian repository (I know, happened only once in unstable, bad year)

Disadvantages:

  • ~ button is moved from top left, just under Escape key to the right of shift button - I HATE THIS
  • Touchbar is horrible and useless
  • Page Up and Page Down keys doesn’t work properly out of the box (even on external keyboard!). There is a fix, but it gets wiped regularly by system updates and it doesn’t work in some applications
  • Keyboard quality is questionable (2016 model)
  • No right click (but there is with PC mouse)
  • Natural scrolling which, for me, is inverted - fortunately it can be changed
  • Apple being ignorant to other ways of using the system
  • xcode + SDK - I hate accepting some proprietary license shit just to compile C software or use Homebrew in macOS every new OS release
  • very slow IO in Docker
  • Finder for file management is depressing and annoying at the same time - Midnight Commander is much better (!)
  • No usable gallery app by default….Preview is shit - I use DigiKam
  • New chargers are not grounded, so sometimes I get a mild electric shock
  • There are always small differences here and there for no good reason like using different terms for basic stuff (think different?)
  • Close buttons on the left side which is fucking annoying - but I totally hate this in in Chrome for Android so much I don’t use Chrome on smartphone. In macOS I close windows through panel
  • Apple is not as open source and stuff and have their closed crypto library - you WILL see these SSL problems with certificates
  • Also enjoy rare, but annoying problems with stock GCC 4.3 or Clang in gcc command and trying to get magic working and link newer GCC
  • No normal MTP support - you have to install Android File Transfer which is like from another world. Why the fuck it is not mounted somewhere, so I can copy files via Midnight Commander and I have to drag and drop them to Finder?
  • Is expensive
  • Catalina is SHIT and 32-bit applications (games) don’t work
  • USB-C ports are wobbly after 4 years, even those which were not used and I cannot have connected SSD drive without random interruptions when I move laptop. Some cables are better at it, but true USB-C to USB-C….are not (2016 model, heard they fixed it later).
  • starting applications and being on slow and erratic internet causes programs to start much slower since every run is validated against Apple servers (cannot be turned off, you can only go offline)
  • the future is bleak - not enough user control, recently they announced scanning for specific files on all users devices (so far only on iPhones, but they are trying to unify)
  • the build is not that great as it used to be, forget about people having macbooks for 10 years

Overall I’m satisfied with my Macbook, but slowly, but surely I’m starting to look for an alternative (EDIT: in the end I switched to Dell, but wouldn’t if there were better options at that point in time). Ideally I’d like to have something like Macbook, but with keys instead of touchbar and dualboot wuth Linux. But Linux is not fully supported.

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