Three months with MacOS after 20 years without: A Review

I’ve used windows since win95 and linux for a decade, but my latest mac was my parent’s old Macintosh SE growing up. When I got a 2018 macbook pro for work, I decided to keep a notebook with my thoughts on the experience [footnote]I largely never bought macs because I think they’re overpriced for the hardware specs.[/footnote].

The hardware is elegant

Obviously. Apple sacrifices a lot of hardware features and repairability to make the physical object elegant. The trackpad and keyboard feel good to use. The retina screen is great: viewing angles, color and resolution are beyond reproach.

That said, I wouldn’t expect less from a $3500 laptop, Apple or otherwise.

Good use of high resolution screens

On windows and linux, I normally use two screens to work. It’s hard to put a finger on how, but Apple’s modern OS has the user experience built around high resolution screens and working with a single screen is pleasant. I tend to be working with several windows in less-than-fullscreen, which I never do on windows 10 or Ubuntu.

A polished unix-based system

I love having a good shell (zsh) as default. Terminal interfaces on windows in contrast are a mess cmd and powershell are incompatible and both lacking.

While windows’ WSL makes great progress on this front, it still often feels like a hack. Having native unix on a polished OS is a big feature. Brew is a great addition for developpers.

The ergonomics are sub par

Apple, unlike Windows, doesn’t mind breaking backward compatibility or removing hardware features in the name of minimalism. Here is a list of complaints:

• Only 4 USB type C ports on my $3000 machine, requiring (at minimum) a $50 adapter for regular USB/ethernet/HDMI/SD card support.

• The trackpad is massive. This pushes the keyboard far from the edge of the chassis, forcing uncomfortable positions long term. You would expect more focus to be on the keyboard given this is a “pro” machine, and professionals normally use hotkeys in their professional software, but there’s no option with a smaller trackpad.

• Dragging and dropping files into applications takes a tediously slow “wiggle” animation to get started. I didn’t know where else to put this so here it is.

biggest of all:

The keyboard layout is bad, bad, bad

I’m not talking about the scissor switches. They’re fine [footnote]on the assumption that Apple still repairs them for free otherwise I wouldn’t be fine with it obviously[/footnote]. Apple themselves admitted to failure by changing the keyboard layout for the latest model.

• Having to switch between the option and cmd key to do text selection (eg. quickly selecting 3 words, copying and pasting them) is cumbersome compared to just holding down the control key on linux and windows.

• Having 4 (!!!) different alt-keys (fn, ctrl, option, cmd) on the bottom left with subtle behavior differences for similar operations means you’re often jumping between them on shortcuts, and make more mistakes than on the simpler ctrl+alt setup.

• Squeezing the up and down arrow keys into one key is unergonomic. The down arrow key is one of the most used keys – 95%+ of the time a user starts at the top of a webpage or document and wants to go down to read more. Going up, left or right is rare in comparison. So the arrow down key deserves a full slot at minimum.

• If Apple is going to move the escape key to the touchbar, then it should be courageous enough to remove the one key no one ever uses: caps lock. Remap it to anything else and it’ll be a better use of this prime keyboard real estate. It can be relegated to the touch bar for the 3 COBOL users who actually need capitalized words often.

Apple’s own MacOS apps are not stable

When you use some software for a long time, you develop subconscious ways of interacting with it to avoid bugs and crashes. The software effectively performs operant conditioning on you.

That said, after a few months of use, I’m strongly of the opinion that Apple’s own apps on macOS are some of the least stable. While writing this, a macOS update bug that bricks users devices came out, reinforcing this belief. Here are other examples I ran into:

• Finder crashes on edge cases (connection/disconnection) with shared folders. Requires OS restart to get going.

• Impossible to disconnect Finder from a connected server with shared folders, even though the connection is obviously broken.

• MacOS can’t write to a NFTS formatted dive directly, however it has no issue doing that to a NFTS shared folder.

• Photos apps importation to Finder by drag-and-drop silently fails when doing it with a large amount (500+) of photos. It imports 150 or so then silently stops.

• Safari crashed requiring a full OS restart to get working again. I never saw a browser hang this badly with any other browser on any other OS in a decade.

• Siri (from the touchbar button) frequently hangs.

• iTunes, 2 decades later, is still a giant turd.

• Copying files from an iphone is a nightmare still. I thought file copy bugs from iphone -> windows were because Apple didn’t care to debug windows <-> iphone USB connections, but clearly it’s because connecting iPhones to anything except a power cable isn’t encouraged.

iPhone file transfer is so bad, so paid apps (eg. waltr) have popped up to make it anywhere near useable.

Some of those problems are a legacy of the fact that Apple had a DRM empire starting with the iPod, and wanted to make file transfer hard to encourage using iTunes and their proprietary file management (eg. iCloud). That doesn’t excuse the abysmal quality of their file transfer in general.

Conclusion

MacOS is a good operating system with its share of upsides and downsides. I can see myself using it long term, however, I still think the up front price of $3500 for a laptop with a rx560 as a GPU (equivalent to what you’d get in a $1000 windows laptop) is worth the price, even with the excellent retina screen. However, the deal breaker for me is repairability and repair prices.