I hate the tribalism regarding Apple products. There are loyal fanboys who won’t hear a bad word about Apple, and then there are Apple haters who criticise everything about them.
I wish we had some more nuance in this debate. The reality is that there are advantages and disadvantages to Apple products. I’ll outline a few:
Advantages
- Long iOS support. Typically you can expect an iPhone to be supported for 5-7 years, which is well above the average in the industry.
- No bloatware or adverts on the iPhone
- Better privacy than Google Android/Microsoft Windows
- High-end hardware, e.g. M1 chip in MacBooks.
- User friendly design. Nice user experience.
Disadvantages
- Overpriced. Seriously all Apple products are more expensive than the competition.
- Anti-consumer business practices that influence the industry. They normalised removing the headphone jack and using non-removable batteries, which other manufacturers followed. Another anti-consumer practice is using their proprietary Lighting port, rather than USB (luckily the EU should be forcing them to adopt USB-C and removable batteries soon). Also, no SD card slot because they want you to use iCloud
- Walled garden. No support for side-loading apps
- Required to use iTunes to add/remove music to the iPhone, which is a problem if you use Linux (you’d have to use Wine to install the Windows version as a workaround)
I use Iphone and Ipad just for the banking. I distrust Android. It is an open system, and used a lot more for data collection than Apple’s ecosystem is. The return you get from a data request between apple and an Android system is vast. I refuse to use Facebook and the likes.
I never buy the latest edition of Iphone anymore. I have done in the past, but the idea of spending £1200 on a phone seems stupid to me. I have very few apps on both the Iphone and Ipad. I use a PC for other stuff. Iphone hardware is good with the CPU side of things, but the cameras are very inferior compared to some android phones.
I use a windows PC to move my own music to my iphone, but it is a hampered system. I really do not understand why they have not been brought to the spotlight of the monopolies commission because of how bad they hinder transfers. I have a process I have to follow to get new music on my iphone. Anyone who wants movies on their apple products should look at VLC. It is the easiest method. I should add I haven’t added new music for a long time. This could have changed, but I would be sceptical until I saw it for myself.
I look down on anyone buying a Macbook. They are total dogcrap, and massively overpriced. They are designed to fail in many areas, the latest being the SSDs that are causing surges in the motherboard, which destroys it. Apple constructively inhibits any repairs behind software encoding and pressure it puts on 3rd party suppliers. They lobby US government to restrict self repairs. You are literally throwing money into Apple’s bank account for very little return.
Intel macbooks deserve the hate, but the apple silicon ones are genuinely impressive to the point of being worth it until the competition catches up in terms of ARM performance, especially in terms of battery life.
I don’t know, I have an M1 Mac Mini and it is awful, I’ll never buy another M chip. It’s fast when you’re just using a single program, but having more things open and it slows right to a crawl. Plus it’s inability to do actual virtualisation is a real pain.
Very odd… i multitask and run both paravirtualized (arm) and virtualized (x86) linux and windows without issues. You are more likely on the base model and out of RAM.
It is the base model, I have about 2gb of ram free but it does run out quickly and due to apple bullshit there’s no way to just open it and upgrade the ram (also, how the hell do they think 8gb is acceptable?). And they’re capable of emulation, but not true virtualisation and things like VirtualBox don’t run at all, unless that’s changed recently because I admit I haven’t looked into it since I found it was impossible after I got the machine.
Also once I have a single docker container running, it causes things like chrome to crash all the time, and I can’t even run chrome, vscode, insomnia and a docker container together. Absolutely trash machine, doesn’t compare even slightly to my 6 year old i7-8700k machine that’s fully customisable. I don’t see any reason to ever get another arm machine, and definitely not another Mac.
8GB is more than enough for someone who only does a little light web browsing and sending the occasional e-mail. Anyone who needs more from their computer is expected to know better and not order the base model. 32GB is workable, 64GB is better.
I have a MB pro with M1 Max and 64GB RAM and it’s an absolute beast. I can throw everything at it and it doesn’t break a sweat, and I’m a demanding user. I’m a developer and have a lot of software running all the time, 400+ tabs open in Safari, lots of PDF files and other documents open. I’m also running it with 2 high-res monitors (5k2k ultrawide and a 4k). Lots of work related apps (e.g. Teams, Outlook, and bullshit like that). The fan doesn’t even come on. Not even when I compile a large codebase using all 10 cores. It’s an absolute monster. And all that in a 14” laptop. Easily the best computer I ever used.
