I think everything you’re saying is right; but also it doesn’t matter. When my mum asks me which computer to buy, I’m not going to recommend the computer that has defects that I can explain away. I’m going to recommend the machine that works out of the box, where I won’t have to goof around with graphics drivers via PPI or whatever to make an external display work.
Sure, but I really must emphasize that I am not advocating this setup for your mom or anyone’s mom necessarily. I’m saying that if you’re a developer you may like this setup. The fact that Linux is not always a great choice for non technical people isn’t really relevant to the value some of the people from Hacker News may get out of it.
I agree with you and for a long time I recommended apple to others. But now I don’t feel comfortable doing that anymore because “it just works” no longer holds true.
I agree. My 2012 MacBook Air was rock solid and often made it between macOS point releases without being restarted.
My 2016 MacBook Pro has display issues, keyboard issues, the USB c power cable falls out sometimes. When I first got it, the machine sometimes crashed when connecting an external display. They fixed that, and then the machine would just not see the display sometimes until I reboot. I use an EGPU now - which performs better but the machine ends up needing a reboot (or just hard crashing) every week or two. It’s abysmal. Oh, and I’m starting to get the stage light effect on the display now. I’m relieved I’ll be able to get that fixed for free now, since I imagine it’s only going to get worse as the cable degrades. I feel like Apple snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
I’ll probably replace this machine in a year or two. I don’t want to run Linux or windows on my work laptop but I’ll do what I need to do in order to have a reliable computing environment. Since they’re near the end of this design cycle I’m hoping this 2019 edition or the one after have most of the design problems fixed. If not, Linux for windows is looking mighty fine these days.
