> Can someone shed some light on what microsoft has been selling that everyone wants? I'm really curious now.
Operating systemwise? An unbelievably vast software ecosystem and a highly performant, user friendly, highly hardware tolerant, flexible OS. There are things I like to do that are either impossible or such a giant PIA on my rMBP that I just don't do them. Coming from Windows-land, the software ecosystem on Macs, especially the kind of hobbyist software I like to monkey around with, feels like a barren wasteland comparatively.
Don't get me wrong, I love my rMBP, and I get my work done on it well enough, it's the best portable virtualization hardware I've ever owned and the second Apple laptop I've owned. But I've also realized that I spend 95% of my time on it either SSH'd into something else, in a browser or using software that's also available on Windows (and often works better, like Office of Chrome). I can do those things with hardware that's 1/5th the cost and have it be almost exactly as performant for those use-cases.
For my next laptop, if I can find a high quality portable Windows laptop with good virtualization characteristics I'd be 50/50 on not buying another Apple product because of the things I have to set aside due to the spare software ecosystem. There's also enough day-to-day irritants and workarounds with the hardware and especially OS X (and especially the stinking pile of garbage that is Finder) that I find I spend most of my time trying to avoid the OS. For portability and form factor, a Surface Pro 2 is definitely something I'm considering as a next portable.
It seems these days, Apples get used in software development and server admin functions or among liberal arts students. And for the typical users (not the HN crowd) justifying an expensive price tag for marginally better portability for something that gets used mostly as a glorified web browsing terminal and Word/Excel computer is not a smart purchase decision for most consumers.
I've had a mbp for my last two laptops and I'm done with them as well. Finder, iTunes, the horrorshow that is xcode slay me. My rmbp has been crash happy and refuses to sleep (buggy video drivers). The wireless card has been awful (stops working). And for a business user support for hardware failures is laughable (2 week Depot!)
The only compelling app has been cord. It far and away is a better remote desktop client. Well that and having a real shell.
I've been buying dell latitudes as of late for my devs and they've been awesome. Windows 8 is patently terrible though.
To be fair windows 8.1 isn't that bad. I'm writing something at the moment which returns it to a usable state through group and security policies and registry tweaks. By definition it doesn't add anything to the OS like start menu replacements but it makes it usable for desktop and corporate users.
Curious, what hobbyist software do you play with that has a better Windows presence than on OSX?
I don't think your characterization of most Apple users is fair, either. Here's an analogy: my neighbor thinks I am an utter fool because instead of buying a 1995 Honda Accord for $50 from the junkyard and overhauling it in my garage, I bought a newish car for way more money. I value more in a vehicle than its ability to transport my body from point a to b. To him, this is idiocy.
Put more explicitly, owning what I think is the most beautiful piece of computer hardware money can buy is worth more than zero dollars to me. A lot of people seem to feel the same. And that's just the hardware, but you get the point.
I'd like to add to this. It's the little things that i like about my macbook pro. The magsafe has saved my laptop several times. Optical audio out makes music so much more enjoyable. The trackpad is easily worth 5x as much as the nearest pc laptop that i have used. The battery life is significant - around 38% better than windows 7 on mountain lion, and i'd imagine the situation is even more pronounced on mavericks.
plus the lack of pre installed spyware etc. makes everything just so much more pleasing. I haven't run a virus scan since i got a mac.
I had a 2010 MBP and the magsafe stopped power cord tripping. That wasn't what killed it though. There ate numerous millions of other ways to kill a notebook.
Buying a machine that can survive relatively extreme drops and liquid incursion (for me a ThinkPad) covers way more possibilities than a magsafe cable. In fact I've fallen over the cable and pulled it off the table a few times and it doesn't suffer any damage. I think the wrong end of the problem is saved with the cable design.
I do think the Apple hardware is beyond reproach for the most part. But it should be at the price I'm paying for it. I grab my rMBP for on the go trips before I grab any other laptop I own.
> But it should be at the price I'm paying for it.
Are you talking about the 13" or 15"? As a lifelong PC user I just bought a 13" because the comparable ultraportables costs more than the rMBP. I'm getting better hardware for less money w/ Apple. Look at the new Lenovo X1. They want $2100 for 8GB/256GB!
It's a good question, and it's a topic that you simply won't even be exposed to if you're purely an Apple product user.
Setting up your choices as a $50 clunker or a newish car is a false dichotomy that doesn't exist in car purchases and doesn't exist in computing. For $500 I can buy a laptop that will let me do everything I want to do hobbywise. That means I can buy a new one every year for six years, meaning I'll get better hardware every year for more than half a decade, before I hit the price of my bottom spec rMBP I got last year. Are they not as nice pieces of hardware? Sure! But at that price I don't care, I'm getting what I pay for. There is simply no reliable low mileage $3500 used Honda Accord option in the Apple world.
Most Mac software I've run across that I'd describe as "hobbyist" are either ports of open source projects or "scratch an itch because OS X or the default app suite it ships with is broken".
Rather than go into a list that would go on forever, I'd ask this, what hobbyist software communities can you not participate in because you're on a mac?
Think about how many times you or somebody around you has said "doh! too bad I'm on a mac" and then think of that time as the tip of an iceberg with a catalog of whatever software that goes into the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Okay now some examples:
Or consider this one example among thousands. Suppose I'm into old Japanese Games (niche, but there's a hobbyist community around it) and want to play the Sharp X68000 Castlevania Chronicles because it exists nowhere else. I turn to emulation and find at least 5 emulators for the platform on Windows, 2 or 3 of them are actually pretty good. There's 1 for OS X and it doesn't work all that well and the community hasn't even bothered translating the docs from Japanese. Or even worse, for the Playstation 2, there are 0 emulators.
Or suppose I want to participate in the Demoscene, put my coding skills to the test, that sort of thing. In 2013 there were 15 releases in the community. By way of comparison, there were about 20 linux releases in the same time period. On Windows there's been 15 releases this month and something north of 8,000 releases in 2013. The Amiga has a more vibrant community in this milieu than the Macintosh does.
Things are better if you're a musician in the scene, there's a handful of trackers available for OS X, and they're pretty good ones. But let's say I want to support my team and help with making a 4k intro. There are no tools available on the Mac for writing 4k music. That's cool, I'll help out with the regular music and start grabbing VSTis and VSTs...ooooh...95% of the hobbyist community's VST work is done with Windows and they don't work on OS X without a bunch of kludges (if they work at all). Here's the current instructions for a somewhat workable solution http://diaphone.blogspot.de/2010/12/11.html?m=1 on OS X.
And the age-old games ecosystem.
And these are just the 3 hobbies I personally follow. I have an Aunt who has an automated sewing machine and like making patches and things for her grandkids. AFAIK there are zero tools on OS X for this hobby. And the list goes on and on and on.
It's just not a good platform for these kinds of hobbies. If I was really into writing or painting or more "analog" hobbies, OS X is awesome for this. If I was into configuring LAMP stacks and such, it's pretty good. But outside of that it's a near barren wasteland.
Operating systemwise? An unbelievably vast software ecosystem and a highly performant, user friendly, highly hardware tolerant, flexible OS. There are things I like to do that are either impossible or such a giant PIA on my rMBP that I just don't do them. Coming from Windows-land, the software ecosystem on Macs, especially the kind of hobbyist software I like to monkey around with, feels like a barren wasteland comparatively.
Don't get me wrong, I love my rMBP, and I get my work done on it well enough, it's the best portable virtualization hardware I've ever owned and the second Apple laptop I've owned. But I've also realized that I spend 95% of my time on it either SSH'd into something else, in a browser or using software that's also available on Windows (and often works better, like Office of Chrome). I can do those things with hardware that's 1/5th the cost and have it be almost exactly as performant for those use-cases.
For my next laptop, if I can find a high quality portable Windows laptop with good virtualization characteristics I'd be 50/50 on not buying another Apple product because of the things I have to set aside due to the spare software ecosystem. There's also enough day-to-day irritants and workarounds with the hardware and especially OS X (and especially the stinking pile of garbage that is Finder) that I find I spend most of my time trying to avoid the OS. For portability and form factor, a Surface Pro 2 is definitely something I'm considering as a next portable.
It seems these days, Apples get used in software development and server admin functions or among liberal arts students. And for the typical users (not the HN crowd) justifying an expensive price tag for marginally better portability for something that gets used mostly as a glorified web browsing terminal and Word/Excel computer is not a smart purchase decision for most consumers.