alt Hacker NewsI have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.
Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.
I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.
I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
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I got a third party replacement battery in my iPhone. The battery works just fine and the reason is simple, I no longer live in the US, where the phone was purchased, and if I want to keep my 2 eSIM slots, then I can't get the phone fixed in Hong Kong. Anyone who thinks Apple is very convenient has never lived in multiple countries, imo.
But that's not the worst of it. It took me some time to realize this, but when I wanted to see why my battery was draining so fast one day (I suspect Youtube has a long standing bug that causes it to go turbo drain mode for some reason, the app is incredibly poorly programmed and leaks memory over time, if you didn't know).
But lo and behold, I couldn't see the per-app battery usage breakdown! Why is that? Turns out Apple disables it if it can't detect a third party battery. Why? I'm sure someone will come and try to defend it, but if you do, you better come with an EE degree and math. To me, it looks like a punishment for not being able to go back to USA within my warranty period to replace my phone's battery which was down to 75% capacity.
I followed the same progression and am also now contemplating going back to Android with my next phone. Cramming ads in Wallet, the way ads pop-in in YouTube, and the overall clumsiness of Liquid Glass have me really questioning whether the "just works" aspect of Apple's first-party cross-compatibility is worth it.
I'm the opposite. I started as a die hard iPhone fan, eventually switched to Android and never looked back. My wife has an iPhone and every time I use her phone I find myself wondering wtf their UX designers are thinking.
I am still rocking my M1 MacBook Air and performance-wise I have no complaints. Even doing heavy workload, it manages surprisingly well.
What I don't like is the direction MacOS is heading to. In my opinion, it always catered to the "casual" people UX-wise, but somehow I feel more and more that I, as a developer am just an afterthought.
On the other hand, I replaced Windows on my gaming PC and I keep thinking about buying a Laptop for Linux. I always had a sweet spot for KDE, but the amount of configuration it allows, while having nice defaults is such a nice experience after the Mac...
IPhone users switching to android due to enshitification and android users switching to iPhone due to the locking down of third-party apps and if you're forced into a walled garden might as well go to brushed aluminum one.
Basically everyone is getting shafted.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I thought I was the only one.
Maybe it's because I started on Windows and Gnome "feels" closer? Hard to quantify. Like they're US and Britain, while macOS is China.
Ah yes. Gnome. The beloved Linux distro that does not hold the Linux community back in any way shape or form. They’re doing a good thing by holding wayland development back and keeping us in the 90s forever! Go Gnome!
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.
You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.
> I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.
I guess it depends on what you're used to? The last time I tried using GNOME, I found it very unintuitive. I ran into stuff like:
- Why don't windows have maximize and minimize buttons?
- Why do I have to go to a separate screen to un-minimize a window?
- Why does launching software require going through the GNOME equivalent of the Windows 8 start screen?
- Why can't I make the trackpad scroll speed slower?
- Why don't I have any system tray icons?
- Why do the extensions I installed to work around some of the above problems (some of which have millions of downloads yet haven't been added as settings) break after every GNOME update?