Losing Thunderbolt is a bit too much, isn't it?

I thought development for it was not in a good place?

Isn't the battery life shit? Maybe I'll try it

For me, battery life and power management – even with the number of services that macOS runs. I run Asahi Linux when docked, but on the go I estimate I get a warmer lap and about ~1/2 hr less.

Pixelmator Pro

A lot of users still like the mix of a good UI for most tasks, while being able to do a lot of power user stuff without an added layer. Plus many will choose macOS also for the hardware, which support for new chipsets is still rather WIP under Linux.

The big thing for me has always been (a) reliability of the hardware (b) good performance/battery trade off (c) nix-like environment.

In my prev. job I had a windows laptop with WSL2 though and I actually was super productive with that. But the laptop hardware offerings at the same price point are rubbish, just not very robust. Linux machines if you're in a corp and want one in the next 6 months are usually even more restrictive on hardware than they are on Windows.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't

Your definition of power user may vary but for me:

    - Especially for laptops, good integration with hardware (and good hardware), energy efficiency, power management
    - Support from commercial software vendors

I could probably use linux for a desktop machine, that would work ok. But it's a no-go for laptops. And I've tried... and try regularly...

Perfectly working drivers.

As a power user, I want to use, not to fix, my tools.

I might tinker sometimes, but that is unrelated for me.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

Primarily much better compatibility with graphical apps. Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are two that many people need access to. Both have first-party offerings on macOS, and somewhat poor support via wine on Linux.

With Apple Silicon, the hardware is also particularly excellent. And only runs macOS well.

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

It just happens to be so that hardware which power users like to use comes with macOS installed.

For me it's quite simple: It works and it stays out of my way.

I've owned a macbook since 2010, with a short break during the touchbar era when I got myself an XPS with windows which I dual-booted with ubuntu and later a system76 that comes with their own flavour of Ubuntu, called Pop! Os.

The situation in windows (windows 10 at the time) was abysmal. Completely incoherent UI, settings spread across different menus, ads in start menu, slow and broken search, constant nagging to update windows, to update the drivers, to tell me that the drivers have been updated, to install or update my antivirus, etc. These were not things that I installed myself, these were included with Dell's setup of the machine.

On the system76 laptop things were different. Things were calm, I could configure everything as I wanted and things worked. Until at some point I installed a new version of something, which had nothing to do with sound, but it broke sound, just as I was preparing to join a meeting, and just as we were going into the second phase of lockdowns in late 2020 so online meetings were here to stay.

My macbooks are reliable. I've got the M1 as soon as it came out and I never got a single issue with it. I've upgraded twice (I think) across major versions and everything worked. I don't have to worry about it leaving me hanging when I need it.

(And that's not taking into account things like build quality, touchpad quality, battery life, silence, etc)

In the end of the day, I do a lot of debugging as part of my work. When I don't work, I want to choose what I will be debugging, not have it forced on me.

And don't get me wrong: I see where Apple is going, I know that they're a greedy company that want to maintain their iron grip and have the final say on what we can and cannot do on our machines.

However, for me for the time being it's the least bad option.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't,

Quite simply, an OS that you don't have to think about. I moved to MacOS from linux after seeing my co-founder use their Macbook basically without any problems, much longer battery life, nice conveniences like shared clipboard and wifi password sharing, airplay, Airpods integration, better screens and font rendering, perfect migrations to new hardware, etc.

While I learned a lot tinkering with linux for a decade, at some point you can't beat something that just works.

> what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?

Access to Apple ecosystem - iCloud e. t. c. If one uses iPhone it's quite convenient to have access to the same cloud services from a laptop. FindMy is a big one for me - if I lost or misplaced my phone I can use FindMy on Macbook to locate it. While it's technically possible to use FindMy via web you'll need the phone as 2FA which is not an option when I'm trying to find it.

battery management, ARM chips, SoC ram, only decent trackpad in laptops, only good audio output in laptops (3V RMS for 150+ Ohm headphones. literally no other laptop has it), etc. These things are only possible on Macs because of economies of scale. But the most important part, to me, is software. again, economies of scale -- almost every polished app comes to Mac OS as the first OS because of the monetization potential per install. Then apps for Windows or Linux are often an afterthought or are non-native.

Mac OS is not great, no platform is perfect. Gotta think what is important to you. Are you using your machine as a thin client? Then maybe Linux is fine. Windows is obviously tragic -- zero advantages there.

about the article, Mac OS can be gutted via disabling SIP (I'm doing it on 1 macbook air), but we have so much compute and RAM that it doesn't make much sense for most use cases. I know that some companies do this with minis/studios to make makeshift servers.

For me: pro & creative apps. GIMP/Inkscape will never replace Photoshop/Illustrator/Affinity. Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, etc. are not available on Linux and with the exception of REAPER, the alternatives are awful. And even with a Linux-compatible DAW, very few plugins are available on Linux.

On macOS, I can work on hobby software & graphics/music.

> I've never personally understood the point of macOS for power users

These threads always end up with veiled insults like this. Can you really not understand people who use Windows, Linux and Macs? They each have their strengths depending on what you are doing.

> which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want

I've use Macs since my first G4 PB, Linux for longer, and used to develop for Windows though it's been a very long time. I've never felt stopped for doing what I want.

> by just building up from a minimal distro like Arch or NixOS

Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro. I'm sure desktop Linux has improved since the last time I tried running it as my main computer, but I just not sure what the point is now.

As a mobile app dev, I'm forced to use macOS: no iOS SDK on Windows/Linux/etc

I'd love to know what's good ARM notebook which works fine with Linux.

I got my first MacBook around 2010 because I was tired of fixing suspend to RAM every few Nvidia driver updates on my ThinkPad. Then I paid for a commercial VM to seamlessly run some Windows software I needed for my freelance work as a translator, removing the need to dual boot two operating systems. Everything just worked, and I could focus on things I wanted to do instead of continuing to tinker with the OS itself. And after years of playing with many different Linux distros, I realised that I did get tired of that. Moreover, a few games that I played, actually had native Mac versions. What's not to like?

These days I do have a Tuxedo laptop for fooling around, and I don't even use laptops on the regular, which is probably why it works well enough. That and integrated Radeon graphics, I'm sure.

Yes on paper. Submitted version differs from what customers run at home/work.

As long as apps can continue to steal focus on windows, windows will always be worse.

I don't know if you've used Windows lately, but Windows is orders of magnitude less pleasant than MacOS (or even previous bad Windows versions like Vista).

Windows 7 you mean.

Windows 11 is far deeper into the sewer.

There are no sales in it.

Apple leadership makes decisions based on money.

That is also why there is no iPhone mini even though there is a small number of people that really prefer a small phone.