There are many arguments here that are valid, but it also goes and repeats the annoying and inaccurate trope that Macs are overpriced. They’re widely regarded to be towards the high end of industrial design - meaning actual hardware build quality, not “looks” - the M-series hardware is at or above perf of competing hardware, and comes with other niceties like being quieter, longer battery life, etc (as appropriate). They even hold resale value better than other otherwise identically spec’d hardware.
People need to stop saying “apple doesn’t have low-price budget models” means “Apple is overpriced”.
A similar behaviour would be to compare flatpak particle board furniture to hardwood furniture, and say the hardware is overpriced.
Funnily enough, I occasionally find some products very competitively priced - especially entry level. E.g. when they introduced the ipad 3, you’d have to sieve double the money on a matching android tablet.
They do like to get their money back by overpriced update options, though…
See I’ve had many Macs of varying kinds over the years and never had a problem - even the admittedly clearly problematic butterfly keyboards. Many of them for many years. I did just recall a hardware issue I had back when ATI was producing faulty cards for everyone. Which I think was the same time NVIDIA was doing similar to all their customers?
I’ve had numerous PCs of varying price points that have failed, but I haven’t had any PC in more than a decade so I’m not going to comment on current quality standards.
Kind of agree with you on the Mac UI not being great - I think a bunch of the post Tiger/Leopard era stuff is stuff for the sake of it?
However modern windows is horrific (dual booting), I don’t understand how it became so bad. Modern Ubuntu desktop is confusing to me? it seems “simplified” by just cutting stuff out - I find it immensely annoying to use, and the launcher is frustrating, and given the option I would ignore it much like I ignore the Mac equivalent. This could be old man shouts at clouds though? shrug
Well, in my experience that was true decade ago, not anymore. Looking from sidelines in company where most people use Apple devices the amount of devices sent to repairs is staggering (broken keyboards, ballooning batteries, units which run lot hotter than identical one on next table and proper overheating causing crashes). Sure M-series processors seem are impressive, but I doubt that all other build issues are fixed.
And holymoley OSX is horrible operating system. Older x86 devices are so bad at leveraging their good hardware that it is ridiculous. And without “I have used OSX when XP was pinnacle of Windows”-nostalgia UX feels clunky, antiqued and full of holes in design.
So I truly do think Apples are overpriced. They still have brand and looks of high end devices, but internals haven’t been it for long time.
But many people want more… flexibility. Open source developers, for example, often want to distribute cross-platform applications with minimal effort. There are entire programming language ecosystems where the operating system you are running on is abstracted away as an implementation detail for many applications. By creating a de facto requirement that macOS, iOS, etc development require the direct access to macOS and (often above market priced) Apple hardware, the distribution requirements imposed by Apple’s software ecosystems are effectively exclusionary and prevent interested parties from contributing to the ecosystem.
Mildly hot take: It’s not hard to have access to a Mac. And if you don’t have access to a Mac, I wouldn’t be confident that the binaries you made would even work. I myself try to avoid cross-compiling with the issues I’ve had with i.e. MinGW on Linux.
Yeah, I’ve been there. It can be tricky, but fortunately Go and Rust abstract away a few common pitfalls. If your project is open-source, someone else may help.
Having open tooling can be extremely useful even if you do have access to Macs. Apple binds toolchain and OS compatibility pretty tightly these days - a given version of Xcode typically runs on the current major macOS version; if it’s Xcode ?.0 ~ ?.2, it’ll typically also run on the previous version (?.3+ will typically not), and usually it’ll work for about one more future major OS version. Individual tools might run outside that range, but it’s certainly all unsupported. If you need to use different toolchain versions for whatever reason, this can get quite annoying. Especially with the x86-64 -> ARM64 transition, “just spin up a VM with an older OS” is no longer a simple go-to solution. (I’m not aware of any emulators which run x86-64 macOS guests with usable speed on M1 based Macs.)
Do you cross compile software for iOS? Most people do, but they’re stuck doing that on a single vendor’s OS that’s locked to specific hardware and virtualization constraints.
Apple’s native code signing tooling has been a kafkaesque nightmare for me. For every combination of signing flags and commands, at most 2 out of 3 of (codesign, spctl, notarytool) agree everything is fine, but the third one doesn’t, and won’t tell why.
So I’m keen to give it a try even for macOS-native workflows just to escape the half-assed underdocumented Apple tooling. Apple doesn’t seem to care about properly supporting any other use than “Upload to Mac App Store” via a GUI button in Xcode.
This is a monumental achievement. Congrats, @indygreg, this is awesome.
There are many arguments here that are valid, but it also goes and repeats the annoying and inaccurate trope that Macs are overpriced. They’re widely regarded to be towards the high end of industrial design - meaning actual hardware build quality, not “looks” - the M-series hardware is at or above perf of competing hardware, and comes with other niceties like being quieter, longer battery life, etc (as appropriate). They even hold resale value better than other otherwise identically spec’d hardware.
People need to stop saying “apple doesn’t have low-price budget models” means “Apple is overpriced”.
A similar behaviour would be to compare flatpak particle board furniture to hardwood furniture, and say the hardware is overpriced.
Counter-point:
My barely used Apple Mac Book Pro 16, half a year old, stopped working completely.
All my Intel arch netbooks had quirks but never stopped working completely. My only other MacBook 2014 crashed randomly.
I had ~7 Intel notebooks and they didn’t stop working until I stopped using them. E.g. for years.
I don’t think that Mac OS has an exceptionally well designed UI but compared to the crappy assemblage of Windows, it is really good and consistent.
I also liked the battery life of the new Mac book pro a lot (except for video conferences).
Funnily enough, I occasionally find some products very competitively priced - especially entry level. E.g. when they introduced the ipad 3, you’d have to sieve double the money on a matching android tablet.
They do like to get their money back by overpriced update options, though…
See I’ve had many Macs of varying kinds over the years and never had a problem - even the admittedly clearly problematic butterfly keyboards. Many of them for many years. I did just recall a hardware issue I had back when ATI was producing faulty cards for everyone. Which I think was the same time NVIDIA was doing similar to all their customers?
I’ve had numerous PCs of varying price points that have failed, but I haven’t had any PC in more than a decade so I’m not going to comment on current quality standards.
Kind of agree with you on the Mac UI not being great - I think a bunch of the post Tiger/Leopard era stuff is stuff for the sake of it?
However modern windows is horrific (dual booting), I don’t understand how it became so bad. Modern Ubuntu desktop is confusing to me? it seems “simplified” by just cutting stuff out - I find it immensely annoying to use, and the launcher is frustrating, and given the option I would ignore it much like I ignore the Mac equivalent. This could be old man shouts at clouds though? shrug
Well, in my experience that was true decade ago, not anymore. Looking from sidelines in company where most people use Apple devices the amount of devices sent to repairs is staggering (broken keyboards, ballooning batteries, units which run lot hotter than identical one on next table and proper overheating causing crashes). Sure M-series processors seem are impressive, but I doubt that all other build issues are fixed.
And holymoley OSX is horrible operating system. Older x86 devices are so bad at leveraging their good hardware that it is ridiculous. And without “I have used OSX when XP was pinnacle of Windows”-nostalgia UX feels clunky, antiqued and full of holes in design.
So I truly do think Apples are overpriced. They still have brand and looks of high end devices, but internals haven’t been it for long time.
Mildly hot take: It’s not hard to have access to a Mac. And if you don’t have access to a Mac, I wouldn’t be confident that the binaries you made would even work. I myself try to avoid cross-compiling with the issues I’ve had with i.e. MinGW on Linux.
Counterpoint: I build Windows binaries for my Go software but depend on users to report any platform issues as I don’t use Windows. 🤷🏻♂️
I wouldn’t feel comfortable shipping binaries for a platform I didn’t use. Imagine trying to figure out Windows issues without a knowledge of Windows.
Yeah, I’ve been there. It can be tricky, but fortunately Go and Rust abstract away a few common pitfalls. If your project is open-source, someone else may help.
Having open tooling can be extremely useful even if you do have access to Macs. Apple binds toolchain and OS compatibility pretty tightly these days - a given version of Xcode typically runs on the current major macOS version; if it’s Xcode ?.0 ~ ?.2, it’ll typically also run on the previous version (?.3+ will typically not), and usually it’ll work for about one more future major OS version. Individual tools might run outside that range, but it’s certainly all unsupported. If you need to use different toolchain versions for whatever reason, this can get quite annoying. Especially with the x86-64 -> ARM64 transition, “just spin up a VM with an older OS” is no longer a simple go-to solution. (I’m not aware of any emulators which run x86-64 macOS guests with usable speed on M1 based Macs.)
Do you cross compile software for iOS? Most people do, but they’re stuck doing that on a single vendor’s OS that’s locked to specific hardware and virtualization constraints.
Apple’s native code signing tooling has been a kafkaesque nightmare for me. For every combination of signing flags and commands, at most 2 out of 3 of (
codesign, spctl, notarytool) agree everything is fine, but the third one doesn’t, and won’t tell why.So I’m keen to give it a try even for macOS-native workflows just to escape the half-assed underdocumented Apple tooling. Apple doesn’t seem to care about properly supporting any other use than “Upload to Mac App Store” via a GUI button in Xcode.
Nice work @indygreg ;)
The prospect of retiring our pool of Mac minis sitting in a datacenter for the sole purpose of signing things is very enticing!