Why I Use a Mac
Defaults matter, and don’t be cute
Never underestimate the power of defaults. It’s true that customization is important. The ability to change things prevents small incompatibilities from making something unusable. But it’s easy to go too far, especially if it’s a product that overlaps with a hobby of yours. Are you customizing because it’s actually improving things or for its own sake?
Why I Use a Mac
Like most people in my age range, I grew up using Windows. It’s what my home and my school had. As a little kid, Windows was so interwoven into what a computer was that I thought of Internet Explorer as the internet. It wasn’t until Google chrome came out that I realized how interchangeable software was and that a whole world outside the default sandbox existed.
Not too long after, I had my first exposure to Linux. Back then, even the easy distros like Ubuntu were still hit or miss. The probability of some driver not working right was still pretty high. It was a crapshoot whether or not a particular installer DVD I burned would work on one of our older computers (and there were different server vs desktop images). I played around with it a bit, but not much.
This changed in high school where I had a part time job making internal websites for a local business we knew through family friends. There I was using linux for real, since that’s where my dinky PHP website was being hosted for correcting inputs to a tool that generated PDFs.
Looking back on it, it’s really funny how many times in my programming journey the first project in a new level of professionalism centers around the misery that is the PDF.
Here I learned the basics of how linux worked. The filesystem, firewall, route table, ssh, running Apache. I went on to do my own projects. But Linux was still a server use case for me. In college, I got the newly recently “Retina” MacBook Pro. I got it because of the screen, build quality, and unmatched battery life. I also knew Mac had a good OS UX for laptops, though didn’t realize just how much the OS design tied into the incomparable trackpad.
I grew up building my own computers, so I also still had my Windows desktop. Back then GPT for >4TB hard drives was still pretty novel to use in Windows. And it was one of the most garbage experiences I’ve ever suffered. My computer would regularly corrupt the partition table, and I had to use Linux on a thumb drive to run a recovery tool for nearly 2 days. Even then, sometimes I’d lose files and need to use backup.
On the 3rd or 4th time this happened, I was so annoyed I removed Windows from the machine and just switched it to Linux, despite that I still did like to play the occasional game. Windows was just such a dumpster fire it wasn’t worth it.
Over the years, this held constant. Mac was the unquestioned best laptop experience, and on desktop I’d use Windows or Linux, typically coming down to if that was a year that I was doing any gaming or not.
Today
Once again, recently Windows was giving me issues and driving me up a wall. My work laptop when I’d occasionally go in was crap, and my personal machine was having issues too. My ARM64 Mac (I finally replaced the ancient college laptop) on the other hand was shockingly performant. I knew it’d have better single threaded performance than my desktop, so I gave it a go thinking that even for programming that’s what I’m doing most the time. IDE interactions, not compiling.
To my surprise, even multi-core workloads like compiling were faster on the laptop. Part of that is how fast the laptop is, and part is that Windows is such garbage that Rust compilation gets way slowed down by Windows Defender’s atrocious low level file system hooks.
I started docking my laptop, and never looked back. I use my docked Mac for everything, and my desktop for gaming has Linux and Windows installed. Windows is only used for a Racing Sim. I barely game, and the little I do is well supported thanks to the steam deck. I’m voting with my feet, and my wallet, and just doing everything else on Linux.
What Makes Mac and Linux Better?
They just work. It’s really that simple. I think the easiest demonstration is how they handle updates. Windows updates are frequent, inconsistent, and slow. They almost always require reboots, and when they do they often require rebooting multiple times which is downright inexcusable. There are bugs with the scheduling. It won’t auto update over night and instead will update by force during hours you ban updates. It might update your major OS version without permission. Updates frequently break things, and reset your settings. Especially around privacy.
As an aside, there’s a feeling that the privacy settings being flipped with updates is a conspiracy. While I will always encourage being skeptical of corporations, I also genuinely think incompetence adequately explains this phenomena. What about the Windows update experience gives you confidence in its quality?
The other aspect is better defaults. Almost across the board, reasonable defaults are picked. And this contributes so much to the “just works” experience. You don’t have to think about it or screw with things. Even for someone like me who understands computers, not having to spend that time and effort is huge.
Finally, they have better settings management experience, scriptability, and packaging abstractions. In Linux, it’s obvious. That’s a developer OS so it has these developer things. Yeah Mac doesn’t have a true package manager, but the “Drag the single App file that’s secretly and archive” experience is super middle ground and approachable for the average person.
Why Mac over Linux?
Mac has more software support, but it comes down to the current generation of Apple’s hardware in laptops is just unmatched. Excellent performance, they fixed the bad keyboard and lack of ports, and the battery life is science fiction. The software integrates well for sleep states etc. Clamshell mode works great for docking, there’s a fingerprint reader, the trackpad remains unmatched.
Macs are just simply the best laptops and have been for at least a decade. Now that the performance has improved and you can just dock it, unless you’re gaming or doing a raw compute workload it’s the best desktop-like experience too.
It’s not all rosy though. Apple is stubborn, and has some egregiously stupid choices they refuse to correct. Read about that here.