logoalt Hacker News

stephenhueyyesterday at 9:45 PM2 repliesview on HN

When Apple released its BSD-based OS X at the turn of the century, I was at Rice learning on Solaris machines, and also started dual booting Linux on my personal desktop at the time. My first few years in the working world were spent on Dells running Windows, so by the time I bought my first laptop in 2006, I was excited to spend my dollars on an unusual-looking white Macbook specifically because it had a *nix shell and the developer experience was vastly better to me than any machine I used at my day jobs. I still prefer working on Macs because ever since, they have just worked and Windows has gotten progressively worse (I know, because I have helped my parents with their Surface laptop). Unfortunately, Mac OS X has been less robust in the last several years, and I'd love to see them turn this around, both for the developer experience and for regular consumers. I still like using Photos, but I don't use their cloud for those, and I've been amazed over the years just how uninformative the Photos app on Mac can be when it flakes out and I have to try a rain dance just to get it to sync with my iPhone. That's pretty abysmal for a company that used to just work, but I believe it comes from the top. Steve Jobs used to enforce quality, and I want to see that again!


Replies

gradstudentyesterday at 11:11 PM

Similar experience here, started with the same G4 ("white") iBook. That was an amazing machine. Under the hood it was hard to distinguish many differences with Linux/BSD of the time. The UI on top (OSX Tiger) was peerless -- I recall being very excited for the introduction of Spotlight. I'd say the decline came around 2012-2013 or so. Hardware was still great, but they were no longer updating the GNU stuff and anti-features like SIP made it harder and harder to run the applications I want (gdb for example). I gave up not long after they introduced the touchbar

These days I'm happier (or at least content) without a Mac. My FW13+Linux setup may not be as nice as the latest macbook, but it does exactly what I want and if it doesn't, I have options.

show 4 replies
Schiendelmanyesterday at 11:11 PM

The whole experience you're having with the rain dance is because the cloud does just work. It's a vanishing a tiny percentage of people that don't use it.

show 1 reply