I Was a Hater#

I have been working with computers for my entire adult life, and most of my adolescence as well. I have loved technology from the second I was old enough to play on my Mom’s SNES back on our giant CRT TV. I got my first laptop at 12, a terrible windows 7 Acer laptop, which had the HDD die 3 times in the first year I owned it. After I spent countless weeks troubleshooting that terrible Aspire, I was hooked, and knew I wanted to work with technology. I owned many laptops, smartphones, gaming consoles, and pretty much anything else I could get my hands on. But never, until 2023, have I ever owned a non-work issued Apple device - and now I am hooked.

Apple, for a long time to me, signaled that someone was into computing, but not computers. They didn’t appreciate hardware, not like I did. However, I have come to accept that I a lot of that was simply pride and a lack of understanding. I understood how computers work and how to fix them, so anyone who bought a computer you couldn’t repair yourself and that locks you out of so many parts of the OS must just be misinformed. Clearly Windows, Linux, and Android were the correct choices. You can install any OS you want onto the hardware, you can usually upgrade the hardware, and the prices were so much cheaper for the same hardware.

Now to be clear, I still think that Apple as a company has a lot of issues.

  • Apple will do everything in its power to prevent side loading apps on iOS and iPadOS because their app store cut makes them so much money
  • Apple only switched to USB-C on the iPhone due to the EU forcing them to
  • The only real way to get your Apple products repaired is in an Apple store, where they control part and labor prices
  • You have to use their products the way they intend, especially with iPhone and iPad
  • They price gouge users who need more storage or RAM to a comical level

However, Apple is Getting Their Shit Together#

It may be because of pressure from EU legislation, or a drive to be competitive on features instead of only marketing, but Apple is doing a lot of things right at the moment.

Apple left the mac lineup neglected for quite some time after the mobile boom they experienced with the iPhone. macOS got updates, but many of the features people had wanted for years never came, and the hardware was the same thing you could get in any other computer, but at an extreme markup. Recent updates in the last few years are addressing both the hardware and software of the mac.

x86 is dead, long live x86#

While it may be many decades until we are fully rid of the instruction set of the x86-64 cores which have been around since 1999, the future of computing is moving more towards the ARM. Yes, the same ARM that has been powering most of our phones for over a decade. Even Amazon is pushing its Amazon Web Services customers to adopt ARM, offering lower server prices for ARM workloads. With the release of the M1 chip in 2020, and the 3 iterations since, Apple has performed a near flawless switch to the new CPU architecture.

These chips, while not as powerful as the top tier x86-64 chips, provide plentiful power with one very important upside - power consumption. Power consumption means more than just longer battery life, although it does certainly provide that as well. Lower TDP processors also mean less heat, which solves a problem Apple has had no solution to for a long time. How do you put a powerful processor inside a sleek, lightweight computer.

The MacBook Air#

These new chips allow the MacBook Air, which suffered from overheating and noisy fans in the Intel days, is now the shining star of Apples lineup. I personally use a MacBook Air M2, with the base specifications (8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD), and it has never struggled with a single task I have thrown at it. Photo editing? No problem. 50 tabs open along with news, Spotify, multiple terminals windows, discord, and iMessage? No sweat. All of this without having a fan and with a battery that lasts me multiple days.

The Software… including ‘The Ecosystem’#

macOS is, at first, a capable but unimpressive operating system. It has a good UI, great application support, and all the management utilities you need to get by. Where the magic starts, is when you have multiple Apple devices. I know, this is exactly what Apple wants you to do, get all their devices. But in a world where we all have a phone in our pocket and headphones in our ears, having those work together flawlessly is truly magical. Get a phone call while you are on your laptop? Answer it on the laptop. Need an MFA code from a text message on your iPad? It automatically fills it in for you. Start listening to a work meeting on your phone after you were listening to a video on your computer? Your airpods switch automatically. All of these small quality of life features make it a treat to work with all these devices.

Overall#

  1. My MacBook has the best battery life out of any device I have ever owned, nothing else comes close currently. This is my #1 point for a laptop.
  2. It has the best trackpad and gesture support, which makes working off a laptop much more useable
  3. Best microphone I have had in a laptop
  4. Full fledged shell with zsh or bash, no WSL needed.
  5. HDR support - more on this in the Linux section.
  6. Time machine took me about 5 minutes to setup and gives me hourly snapshots of my files synced to my NAS
  7. Supports all the programs I use natively besides games, which will always prevent it from being my only computer
  8. Continuity with my iPhone is amazing, and I don’t have to switch devices for notifications, phone calls, or messages.

Why Not Windows or Linux?#

Sure, macOS has improved, but that doesn’t mean its better than other operating systems. Windows has been on a downward trend lately, and while I love Linux, it still has a few quirks that prevent me from daily driving it.

Windows#

There was a time I would have sworn by Windows. It was simple enough to troubleshoot easily, it did what you asked it to without fighting you, and it didn’t try to lock you into certain software. Unfortunately, all of that started to change with Windows 10, and has gotten much worse in Windows 11.

Back in the Windows 7 days, there was barely such thing as a Microsoft Account, and it certainly wasn’t needed to setup your new computer. If you wanted to change settings, there was the control panel, where you could change anything about how windows operated. Control Panel

Now there is the settings app, an incomplete mess, which often sends you back to control panel to change basic settings. Except windows now plans to kill the control panel entirely. They also keep killing ways to sign into your computer without a Microsoft account. Why might this be? It is because you are the product with windows, not the other way around. Starting with windows 8 Microsoft introduced widgets into the start menu, many of which in Windows 11 are now ads. This is the same reason they continually push Microsoft Edge and Bing. They want to collect more data on you to sell to advertisers.

The Broken Windows Key that Broke the Camel’s Back#

Even after I got my M2 MacBook Air I was still perfectly content daily driving my Windows gaming PC for most tasks, until one day after formatting a hard drive windows randomly gave me the terribly annoying Activate Windows watermark.

My copy of windows was genuine. I bought a Windows 8 Professional license back in college with the education discount. Since then, Microsoft allowed me to upgrade that license for free to Windows 10, and then Windows 11. I tried all the troubleshooting I could to get Windows to reactivate, but it told me my copy of windows wasn’t genuine. It wouldn’t even load the Microsoft store so I could buy a new key.

With no options left, I called Microsoft support. After ~15 minutes of troubleshooting, the level 1 tech told me my case would need to be escalated. I wait on hold for about 10 minutes, and finally someone answers. They ask for my name, and then immediately hang up on me before I answered their question.

No worries, shit happens. I call back, a little frustrated but still being nice and patient with the new tech that answers. This tech also decides, after another 15 minutes of troubleshooting, that I need to be escalated. I get sent to another level 2 tech, who proceeds to pickup but doesn’t say a word to me (I could hear them talking in the background). I stay on the line because I don’t want to go through this whole process again. After a couple minutes of nothing, they hang up on me again.

I call back a third time, being kind to the tech but letting them know I need this escalated to a manger. “How can this happen twice in a row?” I thought to myself. After another 10 minutes on hold, the tech introduces me to the manager, who apologizes, and says that they will stay on the line with me while they escalate me to another tech. They warn me though, that they will likely not be able to help me as Microsoft is no longer honoring upgraded Windows 7/8 license keys, including the license I have been using for years, on this version of Windows, without a problem. They then go to transfer me, but instead to hang up on me a 3rd time.

How a company can operate like this blew my mind. They broke my product, that I purchased from them, with no warning. After they did this, I called them confused looking for support. Instead of helping me, they hung up on me 3 separate times. It was at this moment I vowed to move off of Windows as my daily driver operating system, although I do have to at least keep it installed for gaming, for now.

Linux#

Oh Linux, you are so close to being good enough. Gaming compatibility has improved leaps and bounds with Valve Proton and the Steam Deck. I have run Linux, specifically Pop!_OS - a gaming focused Ubuntu/Debian based distro - as the primary operating system on my gaming PC twice. Both times, I enjoyed it. But even though I enjoyed it, I didn’t stay. There have been two main factors that sent me back to Windows for gaming and macOS for everything else:

  1. HDR Support - I have an OLED ultra-wide monitor and HDR is what takes that monitor from great to amazing, and Linux simply lacks HDR support, especially for Nvidia GPUs.
  2. Games with anti-cheat lacking Linux support - Eventually, I come across a game all my friends are playing, that simply can not run on Linux. Although they are getting farther and fewer between, there is still enough of them to keep me off it.

I run plenty of linux VMs and containers for hosting applications like this website, but I have yet to have it stick as my desktop operating system. However, I am thinking about taking the plunge once again on my gaming PC, as every time I go back to windows it bothers me more and more. Maybe this time will be the time it stays for good…