Of course it works and is beautiful hardware and all that.
But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.
I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.
As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.
We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy. We know that, but we're all so busy that we have to make that trade. I've used linux since 2000 for servers, I've used it (and still do sometimes) for workstations, but even 2026 linux workstations & laptops aren't at where macbooks were 15 years ago.
Yes, there is a whole moral discussion to be had, but as much as you win points for doing the better thing, the better things don't really pay bills.
The good news though is that we definitely won the server war. We can spin up VMs and install Linux without licences. We have access to software that works well, security updates, frequent releases, a massive ecosystem of free software, no advertising, very little to no licensing for software, and it works incredibly well. So much so, that we can't even imagine a world in which servers require licence keys or subscriptions or a marketplace account.
Imagine now, if laptops & workstations were as solved as servers are.
That's why we aren't there yet, because they're not.
It goes beyond that if you ask me. I think anybody in this discussion knows all these things, but ultimately they fall back to “…and my decision is the correct one.”
5000 people skip over an obvious flame bait thread. 1000 people read but don’t comment at all. 7 people who feel they’ve solved the problem of which laptop is best and want to tell everyone why they should switch to Linux/Mac or why Linux/Mac sucks post obvious comments about Mac hardware and nix freedom. But “the sentiment is rampant on hn” is the take away. The sentiment that is rampant on hn is that there is a sentiment rampant on hn.
Eh, I’d say there is a larger than standard proportion of stalwart know-it-alls here. Doesn’t mean your example is wrong. But man some people have everything figured out and still find a way to complain about it all.
> We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy.
Are we? Not sure what usability and quality improvement there are in an OS where you have to fight against its vendor's decision.
Most critics against Linux I read come from people who never took the time to choose perfectly supported hardware in the first place but just buy whatever bleeding edge stuff is available running on windows, then hope it will works. It is like criticizing Apple/macOS because it doesn't work well on an hackintosh really and is completely dishonest. I don't criticize windows because it doesn't work on the latest Macbook M8 ultra studio pro nor do I criticize iOS because it doesn't work on my Samsung Note tab 6 or macOS 27 because it doesn't work on a Microsoft Surface.
I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
I don't even get the "quality hardware" argument. The only hardware I interact with is my high quality mechanical keyboard, trackball, and color calibrated monitor. All are vastly superior to any Apple hardware that I would interact with.
> Apple laptops are good and all the other ones are bad.
Bad or not as good?
For many people not as good can be good enough.
For instance I am mostly working from home, and will never spend more than 6 hours straight without a pause nor do I work "on the road" so I never cared about having a +11h of battery life. I understand it can be very valuable in some circonstances but it has never been a thing for me and for many people using their laptop mostly at home. I wouldn't trade having a forced siri install or the shitty keyboard that used to come with macbook a few years ago for more battery life than I actually need.
> I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.
You're unique! Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
I don't think so. Critics are usually more vocals than people who have no issues.
My grandmother used linux for years without issue in the late 90's, my ex inherited a computer from me 16 years ago and was still using Linux last I checked 7 years ago, having migrated from slackware to ubuntu on her own without being a particularly tech savy person. She had no wish to get back on windows as it just worked without getting in the way. My current wife migrated to linux without realizing it when the hard drive on her laptop died, she only figured it out when she realized icons of her office suite were different. Using an immutable distro has been painless for her so far in 3 years, same for my daughters, as update are done in the background and system boot simply to new image when started up. I am not even doing any maintenance, just checking once every few full moons that the auto update is still working (which is the case).
> Also I hear what you're saying about the vast choice of laptops available with amazing Linux compatibility
The irony is not lost when I consider this vast choice it is at least bigger than the choice of laptops[1] running macOS at any given time.
[1] currently 8 according to Apple's own comparison table separating model into line, then screen size and cpu.
Isn't the only difference that people using servers are expected to have deeper knowledge? As someone using Linux both on servers and on a desktop, I see little difference.
Apple doesn't even have a tiling window manager as far as I know.
They have one built in now and have had third party ones for over a decade. I used SizeUp to tile windows in Mac OS in 2013. Now the OS has it built in but I find Rectangle to be superior. And it’s free and much better than any window manager I’ve tried in any Linux Distro.
SizeUp isn't a tiling window manager as far as a youtube video showcasing it goes and neither is Rectangle. It's more like an alternative to the Windows aero snap thing.
I'm sorry but objectively macOS window management is wholly subpar compared to the options on Linux.
Rectangle is a literal hack on top that hopefully works when you need it. Rectangle is great, but Rectangle, Yabai and whatnot can only hope that the undocumented private APIs that macOS _allows_ them to use today don't mysteriously break tomorrow.
Meanwhile a Linux window manager actually does its full job unencumbered because it's a _real_ first class window manager and not a hack.
Yeah but the 1% can still accomplish whatever they want. It just may require a bit of code. No big deal if you’re in the 1%. And you get the added benefit of automatic security updates that don’t break critical system components like what happens from time to time in every Linux distro I’ve ever used over the last 20 years.
That simply isn’t true. You can disable whatever you want. You just may not be able to do it through the UI. I’ve customized my Mac to never phone home. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing. It’s even easier if you don’t, and just ask Claude code to do it.
You can’t disable “whatever you want.” As the OP explains, in macOS 27 a “Siri AI” process stays running, always, doing who knows what, even if you turn everything off via the UI and CLI. If you know of a way to disable this, please post it because I’m sure many people would be interested in it.
As another example of what you can’t disable: I don’t wish to subscribe to Apple’s paid iCloud offerings. Yet there are several places in the UI both in macOS and iOS where there are non-removable ads for the service under certain conditions. For example, when your local storage fills up. Oh and now there’s a non-removable 20GB+ Apple LLM model now taking up space on my 256GB ssd. Thanks a lot Tim/John.
But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.
I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.
As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.