On Wednesday I take delivery of a new laptop. My 2019 Macbook Pro had got to the point where it was unusable under MacOS, yet annoyingly still zippy and smooth under Linux. The battery charging mechanism has been flaky for ages, the fans kick in as soon as you do anything strenuous (even watching a video), so it's time to retire it before the battery explodes....
I've had a Macbook Pro since 2004. On a flight to America I sat next to someone with one, and like a sad marketing victim I was seduced by the Dock, with its smooth-scaling icons and whizzy Genie effect. So much so, that on the return flight I had a 16" 'Pro on my lap, all shiny with its PowerPC processor and discrete GPU. It was a monster.
That lasted 4 years. The keyboards weren't as good back then; keys kept popping off but otherwise it was still usable. I'd built a whole cross-platform development suite on it - cross platform in both what devices you could target with the code, but you could also run and build the dev tools on Mac or PC from the same source.
Then in 2008 I bought one of the funky new Intel-based MBPs. I wrote iOS and Android games on it mostly, even managing to convert a console game to Unity. One day I placed it on the car roof, forgot it was there and drove off, only to see it bouncing down the road in my rear view mirror. Amazingly it survived and I kept using it for another few years. That was the thing about MBPs - they're built to last.
So why the change, 22 years on?
Well, a couple of reasons. Firstly, MacOS has become a bloated beast. It needs an optimisation pass, like they did with Snow Leopard. The sluggishness compared to Linux on the same hardware proves that.
Secondly, the Liquid UI is a trainwreck. It's horrific. Big chunky window borders, UI elements that are still visible but not clickable 'cos they're behind a transparent window bar. Finder has always been MacOS's weak spot and now it's unusable. Dragging a file to another window is nigh impossible.
Then there's all the security features. I'm a developer, I need to do things normal users don't. So when I install something, I don't want to be first prevented from using it because MacOS doesn't like the look of a library, meaning you have to go to settings and say "just run it anyway", but then once you've done that having to do it a second time with the app that uses that library is just a ball ache. I know what I'm doing, just leave me alone.
Also security related, there's all the permission popups, which sometimes prevent apps from working. If I see "app wants to access your external drive..." one more time, I'll scream.
Then there's games. And Unreal. Neither work well on Mac.
Under Linux I've rediscovered Steam, and Indie games in general. Proton works fabulously. And no matter how hard you try, Unreal just doesn't like Macs. "Just run Windows under Parallels" you say? No, not on M-series hardware. You're forced to use Windows for Arm, and it just doesn't work.
And finally, one last fist-shake at the clouds: Apple itself. I just don't trust them any more. No Apple, I'm not going to upload Government ID to you to prove my age - the very fact I've had an Apple account since 2004 and an Apple Developer account since 2007 already proves this. Then one day iCloud decided I'd exceeded my storage limit (I hadn't) and started bouncing incoming emails. Apple couldn't fix it, so I had to tear the whole thing down and set everything up elsewhere; demonstrating my dependence on huge American companies who don't care. Today I have nothing to do with American companies. I only use Unreal and Unity when I absolutely have to, and Apple are the last to go.
So there you go. Bye bye Apple, bye bye America. No doubt I'll be bitching on here shortly about installing Ubuntu on the new laptop....