Ditto. I have a self-built PC that has an install of Win11 Pro on it and it's full of adware and crapware like in the bad old Dell days - except this thing coming directly from Microsoft!
It's absurd how badly the Windows customer experience has degraded in the name of bundling shitty Bejeweled clones - how much money could MSFT be possibly making on this kind of deal that makes the trade worthwhile?!
Not to mention some of the less egregious but nonetheless annoying things - when I had my Win10 install the default Docs directory pointed at the cloud-synced container which then proceeded to pester me about upgrading to a paid plan. Not just once or twice and not in an unobtrusive way - literally on every single boot in the task bar.
I know this isn't the most constructive comment ever, but I just want to vent.
Windows is a piece of shit. It's honestly one of the worst pieces of software I have to use on a daily basis. I've always been some kind of a linux enthusiast, but I've always had to use windows as my daily driver due to either CAD software, ableton live, a certain game not playing nice with linux, etc.
I've been using windows for 2 decades now, and I just can't believe it keeps getting worse and worse. It's slow, it's riddled with ads, it's constantly changing everything around for no good reason. I'm so sick of it, and I'm STILL stuck with it. If I could move autodesk inventor and ableton live over, I'd finally be free, but I've had no luck. I'm just really appalled by the garbage microsoft has pushed out
Same boat. I went the VFIO route: my desktop runs headless Fedora, and I run desktop Linux, windows, and macOS in VMs. I bought an extra GPU so I can run two VMs at a time. 99% of the time I’m on desktop linux, but if I want to play a game I just switch my monitor input and hit my USB switch and I’m good to go. If I want to run ableton, I shut down windows, fire up macOS and bam.
This lets me completely isolate windows and only use it for games. And ableton runs just fine in a vm, so I don’t have to have a separate Mac. Plus it makes it really easy to try out the new Linux flavor of the month!
It was a bit of work to get it figured out but it’s been running smoothly like this for a few years now. I refuse to install windows as a first-class citizen on any computer I own, because as you said, it’s fucking garbage.
> windows feels more and more like adware these days
Which edition of Windows 11 is less/least/not ad-y? Is Pro in any ways better than Home?
Is there an Enterprise edition that I, as a 'normal person' / non-corporate entity, can purchase and use on my personal system (or VM running under Linux/macOS)? I would think that corporations would not want ads on their employer-provided systems, and so they aren't present in the {Pro?, Enterprise?} releases.
>Which edition of Windows 11 is less/least/not ad-y? Is Pro in any ways better than Home?
Pro is better than home as it supports domain join so it will "allow" local accounts (hidden in the OOBE UI under "domain join instead").
As it can domain join it should respect every setting you could set through GPO and allow you to configure a bunch of things the home version won't. But if you're not a windows admin that knows this stuff already do you really want to invest your time in wrangling a increasingly hostile OS?
Enterprise is not really for sale to most people. Technically i suppose you could buy a M365 E3 subscription and use that to activate pro to enterprise, but again do you really want to?
> But if you're not a windows admin that knows this stuff already do you really want to invest your time in wrangling a increasingly hostile OS?
Sometimes it's needed for certain applications, so one has to at least run it in a VM perhaps.
I do Linux sysadmin stuff, but we have to deal with Windows clients, and so I many need it a (home) lab to play with things. I can do domain-y stuff with Samba 4 at least.
I recently installed windows 11 and explorerpatcher on a desktop and it doesn't feel like adware at all.
Aside from yet another revamp of the settings menus it feels more or less like windows. The gripes about the start bar and start menu are valid but fixable.
Only thing is closing down some widgits the first time that I never saw again and uninstalling a few applications.
Counter data point: I maintain a windows 11 PC for gaming, and there are ads everywhere. Most of the ads point back to Microsoft products, but not all.
Launcher ads. Live desktop ads. News ads. Weather ads. Settings page ads. Game bar ads. Lock screen ads.
I turn them off as I run across them, but I can never seem to catch them all.
I have a Windows 11 Pro machine and the only intrusive thing I've ever seen was the small weather box on the taskbar, which I immediately turned off. I've never seen any of the others you mention.
If its relevant I use Firedox and Kagi rather than Edge and Bing/Google.
The fact you have to install a separate patcher from a third party company to fix all the glaring issues with windows is telling. Don't have to do that with a Mac. I use both at work and Mac is less cumbersome and easier to work with than Windows, hands down. Windows is a fractured user experience; they're trying too hard to shove the whole "tiles" thing from W8 into everything else and having ads baked into the OS is appalling. Mac doesn't do that out of the box and I don't need to install anything to make it an enjoyable user experience.
I installed the patcher to restore the windows 10 style start menu and start bar. Microsoft's decisions on the "new" UI for 11 were super dumb.
But after a month of running windows 11 with explorerpatcher for gaming, hobby programming, and music production (daw, vsts etc) everything is pretty flawless.
Most people will not install explorerpatcher. If it's installation is necessary to have a good experience with Win11, then most people will not have a good experience.
"Windows doesn't feel like adware if you run fairly-scary third-party tools on it first" probably isn't the best sell to non-techy people. (Which I figure is who we have to be talking about, since we're responding to a market-trends article.)
Unlike the start menu, I've yet to see advertising when I open the Launchpad or Spotlight. Also, I can complete setup on my Mac without having to create an Apple ID, and if I opt out the system respects that and is quite usable.
Finally, I can easily put the dock (which W11 imitates, badly) on the left hand side of my screen if I wish. But I suppose Macs are less customisable?
Yeah that's true. I get nagged to backup stuff to iCloud or to sign up for apple music but windows has more stuff.
I do see the windows stuff as more upselling to other microsoft apps like onedrive which to me doesn't seem so different form the icloud integration. I use both an haven't noticed much in win11 though.
As a Mac and iOS user, I don't know what you're talking about.
I can't remember ever seeing anything about TV+ or Music, and the only time I'm told about iCloud storage is when my drive or backups are almost out of space, which makes sense.
There might be invitations to TV/Music when you install it or first use the OS or something (I can't remember), but there absolutely isn't anything "all the time".
> when my drive or backups are almost out of space, which makes sense.
This only makes sense to iCloud users. I've never intentionally put anything in iCloud and I get a constant parade of alerts about it being full. On macOS it doesn't matter where you click on the alert widget, it takes you to the page where you can pay for iCloud regardless. It is very spammy.
Yes, phone backups are automatically (or opt-in?) made to iCloud's free storage tier. This is a feature, not a bug, since phones are easily lost/stolen and your average consumer will be happy they didn't lose all their photos and messages. If your free-tier backup space is full, then you need to manage your backups to disable/delete them or reduce your backup size -- those alerts are there for a good reason.
Also, the Mac notification has a prominent "Close" button and doesn't even mention iCloud until you click through to see available options:
Whenever I hit the play button it's like 50/50 if Spotify will continue or if apple will open up the music app inviting me to sign up for music.
I did get pestered about joining icloud pretty regularly in the past but haven't seen those in a bit. I prefer onedrive and Google photos since it works on my non apple machines too.
Echoing the sibling comment, I also have never seen this. I have gotten marketing emails from Apple regarding their bundle package for their services, but after unsubscribing to that I have never seen anything further. I certainly have never seen anything in the OS proper, for any device that I own.
Once you've either subscribed or not to an Apple service, you don't get random popups about it. They offered Fitness+ free for 3-months because I bought a new device; I didn't subscribe and never heard about it again.
That's not my experience with Windows, where I get random popups in the UI of the operating system about different offers. Not cool.
I don't have ads being pushed to me about apples products as I type this from my M1 macbook air. Apple is far from perfect, but in this specific case they are much better than microsoft.
As someone who is accustomed to free software operating systems, macOS is much closer to Windows than it is to what I'm used to.
Just the other day, my M1 Mac at work slowed to such a crawl that mouse movement badly lagged due to runaway 'triald' (ML learning on user inputs) and Siri processes. They relaunched every time I killed them, and they were running even though Siri was explicitly disabled. Turns out there's no way to actually disable Siri without disabling SIP, which I cannot do on my work computer.
So on macOS I'm still plagued with cloud-connected crap I cannot control (or sometimes even expect) that at worst can make my computer completely unusable.
Is it different from Windows bullshit in interesting ways worth talking about? Definitely. Can the two things be compared? Definitely!
It's about comparability of the two operating systems with respect to similarity to 'adware' which is characterized by
- nagging
- online accounts
- tracking user behavior
- 'free' cloud services (the user is the product, blah blah blah)
- having an adversarial relationship with your own tools; having to go to extraordinary lengths to disable user-hostile behavior
which are all very much implicated in products like Siri and in being unable to actually disable it.
When you think seriously about what adware is like and what actually makes it so odious, it's clear that parts of macOS are characterized by many of the same traits and behaviors, even though Apple isn't selling third-party ads in macOS the way Microsoft is doing with Windows.
It's not that heavy handed but if I hit the play button on my headphones/keyboard there's a pretty good chance it opens up the apple music app instead of just playing the open spotify app. Since I'm not a music member, front and center it wants me to sign up.
I definitely remember seeing a tv+ signup with I first got my M2. After setting up the device.
If you're not signed into icloud, well you still have all the apps that want you to sign in. Same goes with the tv app.
I use the music app on iOS with mp3s and 3 of the 4 main app tabs are screens trying to sign me up for apple music.
I wouldn't characterize RDP as particularly fast or efficient.
If you're interested in a turnkey alternative, consider NoMachine.
If you are willing to play around with finicky stuff, Xpra and FreeNX easily outperformed RDP the last time I played with all this stuff (many years ago).
For Linux to Linux X Forwarding-based solutions give you a much better, local-like experience with Linux than you can get without paying many thousands of dollars for Terminal Services on Windows.
Anecdotally, even the non-technical people in my life are starting to notice the decline of Windows after updating to Windows 11. My aunt, for example, has been a Windows user since her first computer in the 1990s and she recently told me that while she dreads learning a new operating system, she's planning to get a MacBook when it's time for a new laptop. I'm also a lifelong Windows user, but I told her that it was a good decision. I don't see a future for Windows.
Same here. Had some family that were long time windows users, got asks a zillion times to upgrade to windows 10. They upgraded and hated it. Asked for help getting linux going. I installed ubuntu LTS, dragged all the icons except file browser, web browser and settings into the trash. Then got their brother laser printer working. They have been very happy since.
Remember the ultra-cheap Windows XP machines that came loaded with weird bloatware? That's what a stock install of contemporary Windows feels like. I think Microsoft is doing so many things right, but the direction Windows is taking is not one of them.
I picked up a macbook air m1 refurbished from apple to see what the fuss is about. It's a great machine. If not for that Debian would be primary OS, as it has been for the past ~15 years. I have one mac and a bunch of thinkpads running linux and/or BSD.
ideally, Asahi would never be finished any more than Debian is. And there will always be more generations of hardware. As long as Martin and others are willing to keep running the project there’s work to be done.
It’s just a question of whether it’s good enough for you or not. And honestly, for laptops, the answer so far is probably still "not". Thunderbolt not working is kind of a deal killer, for example.
Gotta say the other day I was thinking about the Mac Pro and even at only 192GB of memory, 20P/4E with some Optane SSDs and some flash behind it would absolutely tear through postgres workloads, I bet.
Everyone is dumping on Mac Pro for regressing on memory capacity (after spending the last 2 years dumping on the "$50k mac" and comparing it against Threadripper builds that top out at 256GB), and asking why Mac Pro instead of Studio. Since Asahi doesn't support Thunderbolt yet, you can't use enclosures on Studio. Mac Pro is the only option for a PCIe card that Apple won't sign a driver kext for (NVIDIA cards, for example - and they do have an aarch64 driver thanks to the Tegra family!).
NVIDIA glomming onto Asahi and giving it formal support instead of going their own way with L4T/Jetson Linux would be an interesting course of events. It is, after all, just ARM64/AArch64 under the hood.
Sort of. Asahi is doing a ton of work on the fan control, touchpad, GPU, video out, 8k page support, and related that isn't normally required to do a Linux Distro. Once all the user space and kernel tweaks are upstreamed then just about any Linux distro will just work. Sure someone will occasionally have to add support for current apple hardware, but that's dramatically less than starting from zero, and might well not happen under Asahi.
I might be in the same boat as you tbh. I will say, I like macos more than I thought I would, coming from debian. Also, having a terminal/zsh and being able to do some unixy stuff if I want to is a plus.
Mac OS is alright but it has it's flaws. IMHO it's not getting better over the years I've used it. The last few releases basically featured a whole bunch of things I neither care about nor use. Anything to do with widgets, i* apps made by Apple, ios integration (I have an Android phone), etc. I couldn't care less. I use it to run a browser + misc development tools. Could I use Linux for what I do? Yes. And I have. Why do use a mac? The hardware. Fast, beautiful, pleasure to use, runs cool, great battery, great screen, amazing touchpad, and they even fixed the keyboard (took them a while). Not a lot not to like about them.
I haven't used windows in ages so not going to comment on that. The only thing that appeals to me is that it now does linux better than it used to. But the one thing it had going for it back in the day (games) is now something that Linux does as well via Steam. Which, is why I have a cheap laptop running Manjaro and Steam for some casual gaming. Works great. But the hardware is not great.
Microsoft (aside from its niche Surface lineup) is mostly dependent on OEMs for laptops. Apple builds its own hardware and they do a very good job. Other laptops exist but they tend to be compromises on battery, screen quality, performance, touchpads, etc. Most vendors get at least a few of those wrong. Almost all of them ship with mediocre synaptics touchpads. Quite a few insist on bundling screens with unimpressive resolutions, contrast, etc. The cheap Manjaro laptop I have is guilty of pretty much all of that. Mediocrity is the norm for windows laptops. And invariably the nicer ones are close in price to what Apple charges.
There are a few premium laptops of course. But even those tend to be compromises. E.g. Lenovo, which some people seem to like and recommend, comes with this weird nipple thing and a cheapo synaptics touchpad with actual physical buttons. Just horrible. Which is probably why most Lenovo users I've seen seem to use a wireless mouse. Neither the nipple thing nor the touchpad is really usable as an input device, apparently. The screens on those things are also not quite what I'm used to (less color, contrast and pixels, wrong aspect ratio). So, if I'm going to spend lots of money, that's not what I'd buy.
I might put Asahi Linux on a mac at some point though. I don't think I'd miss OS X that much.
That might be the case, but not the cause of this small bump: "Apple’s growth in Mac shipments is said to in large part reflect constrained supply last year."
While lots of things in macOS are missing or broken, I more frequently see OS components spontaneously break down on Windows. On the Windows laptop I'm getting rid of shortly, I have to routinely kill dwm.exe because over time it comes to lag so much that it can't keep up with window movement. Colleagues report daily lockups of the start menu which further result in explorer.exe crashes when the Windows key is tapped.
The last time I used macOS professionally, I also experienced what I'd consider poor stability there, so maybe I'll feel differently after more time. But so far, after several weeks, it seems obvious to me that my new work MBP is much more stable than the Windows laptop they gave me a year ago.
I daily drove a high end Chromebook with Linux containers for a couple years and in a lot of ways it prevents an even better experience than windows. The stability of the base system was unbeatable. Apps running in the Linux container were more crash prone than bare metal, but that should improve over time. I successfully ran Android Studio, Visual Studio Code, and a bunch of other tools with surprising success.
The frustrating part about Windows getting more mac-like is that the skin deep parts seem to be all that gets copied, and those are copied piecemeal instead of as cohesive wholes. If they’re gonna copy I wish it’d be things like all the little power user features that macs have had since OS X reached maturity.
I completely let go of OSX when Apple deliberately broke SMB for the.. nth time. The days of "solid unix os with a beautiful interface" were a decade ago, now it's a toy OS.
it's true. The year MAC has the best new reliable, and fast chip, PC has AMD with broken, burnt CPU / motherboard, Intel has a chip so hot to cool down.
Even outside hardware, a fresh windows 11 install before you decrappify it is such a bad experience.
Clickbait integrated into the OS, sponsored apps pre-installed like it is a $100 android phone, constant attempts to upsell you to their cloud services.
AMD had an issue, but really it was short term and has been fixed, seemed to only impact a few dozen CPUs and motherboard and only when overclocking a home built machine.
Yes it made quite a bit of news and drama, but it's all fixed.
With all that said Apple does have a premium product that generally "just works", is more power efficient, and has (on average) a longer life cycle than a PC.
Apple had a dark period between 2016 and 2019 when the keyboards on MacBooks were complete and utter garbage, but in 2019 they admitted their mistake and dropped the butterfly keyboard.
Both my work-issued 2019 16” and my personal 2023 16” have excellent keyboards.
Long 3 and a half years that I didn’t even feel at all because I’ve never even touched a butterfly keyboard MacBook. My previous personal MacBook was a mid-2015 15”.
No worse than most other laptops, now. A little better than many of them. Not as good as back when Macbook Pros were still thick enough to hold a disc drive and the keys had a lot more travel, but nothing like the dark days of the very-loud, shitty-feeling, unreliable Macbook keyboards of a few years ago. Totally OK.
(FWIW I use a mechanical keyboard with mine when at my desk, but I don't, like, hate life when I'm away from my desk and have to use the built-in keyboard, even if it's for a whole week. It's fine. I don't even really think about it.)
The new Mac keyboards are fine really, they rolled back from the problematic butterfly keyboards to the older magic keyboards (whatever that's actually called, but it feels a lot better and is a lot more robust) - thankfully I skipped the 'butterfly era' completely when I switched from a mid-2014 13" MBP to a 14" M1 MBP.
Actually, Windows keeps getting better. WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial. The Windows 11 interface makes Windows 10 look so dated. In some ways the interface is shaping up to look better then MacOS (still very inconsistent.) The main problems are they are yanking some legacy things that power users have loved. People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains.
> People complain about "ads" in Windows, I never notice, if I do it's easy to turn off. Apple does similar, but no one ever complains.
This is nowhere near the truth. Only ads present in a default MacOS install are in the App Store, for apps. Windows has all sorts of ads in the start menu itself.
> WSL is a revelation, anyone that says otherwise is in denial.
WSL is a buggy mess with a lot of serious problems. It's nice enough for Linux dabblers but anyone else will eventually run into some combination of the memory leaks, data loss, fundamental incapabilities (e.g., no hardware passthrough), inconsistent install process, showstopping window management bugs for the graphical components, random breakage in the CLI interop interface, text encoding problems in the WSL CLI, hangups related to systemd support, lack of a proper service management layer OOTB, etc.
Not sure what you mean, WSL is a simple click and run from the app store now. This isn't WSL1, which did have a confusing process. WSL has changed countless workflows, it's an important addition to Windows. I understand HN is full of Apple fanboys and Microsoft haters (reminds me of the old Slashdot days sometimes), but many need to step outside and realize that Windows has made great strides since Windows 8. People that say it has gotten worse, are just simply incorrect. I don't agree with a lot of Microsoft's decisions with Windows, mostly around the widgets, but I never use them, and I would bet most people don't. Acting like the entire OS is now adware is just complete nonsense.
> Not sure what you mean, WSL is a simple click and run from the app store now.
WSL has different install requirements for Windows 10 and Windows 11. On Windows 10, it requires a special Windows Optional Component to be enabled, which is a change that requires local admin rights. On Windows 11, WSL can be installed from the Microsoft Store with no need to set up the Windows Optional Component. Shortly after that version of WSL for Windows 11 went live in the Microsoft Store, Microsoft removed the hooks in their installer which enabled that Optional Component in the case it was disabled— on all versions of Windows. So on systems where end users have limited or no admin rights, Windows 10 users cannot install WSL, but Windows 11 users can. On systems which use whitelists for specific installers and processes to be able to elevate privileges, installing WSL on Windows 10 broke because the whitelisted process no longer attempts to set up WSL's dependencies. My organization was bitten by this.
Like with other aspects of WSL, the deeper your engagement is the more bugs and quirks are revealed.
> many need to step outside and realize that Windows has made great strides since Windows 8.
Never ran Windows 8, thankfully. All I know having returned to Windows for a year for the sake of a job is that it is much worse than it was the last time I used it. I'm sorry to hear that Windows 8 so lowered your expectations. It must have been pretty bad.
> Acting like the entire OS is now adware is just complete nonsense.
I'm way more interested in setting realistic expectations about WSL for fellow Linux users than the overall value of Windows, which is probably already a settled question for most of us. But this statement strikes me as pretty funny. 'Complete nonsense' is a pretty strong phrase. If you ever figure out what makes something 'truly adware', send a tip to the lexicographers, because I've just checked 3 dictionaries and Windows qualifies as adware by all 3 definitions they had! :P
More seriously: Windows is definitely different from a lot of adware in that advertising isn't the only revenue strategy for Windows, and Microsoft also sees Windows fulfilling other purposes for them than selling ad space. But generally, 'adware' doesn't mean much more than 'annoying software which shows me ads I don't want to see'. How can you argue that Windows is not that for many, many people?
Software is moving to the web or are essentially executables running a web browser (Electron) which is taking the hardware out of the equation - so people just want the lightest device with the biggest battery life. M-series Macs are in a category of their own in this regard. The battery lasts so long that people forget to bring their chargers along.
And unless you're doing some _really_ heavy stuff, they're perfectly fine for software development too. I have personally run Unity + Rider + Dockerised backend & local database on an M-series for years with zero performance issues.
In the Windows 7 era I was almost completely OS agnostic. I may have even slightly preferred Windows because Mac OS support wasn't great back then.
Today I don't think I'll ever use a Windows machine again with the exception of being forced to duel boot for gaming.
Linux is basically my go for most things these days, but I have a Macbook too because there really isn't anything that competes with their build quality (in my opinion anyway).
I don't understand why Windows can't just make a decent professional OS with an old-style start menu and no ads / spyware. If they want to release a ad-riddled piece of crap for home users on a budget then whatever, but I'm obviously not going to be using that as a professional / power user.
I was hoping Windows 8 & 10 might have just been products of Balmer's Microsoft, but they don't really have an excuse for it anymore. If anything it seems to just be getting progressively worse.
It amazes me that reading PC vs Mac vs Linux arguments sound the exact same today as they did 20 years ago. PC is too bloated and intrusive, Mac is too expensive with limited software options, Linux is user-unfriendly but great for servers. Reading this thread feels like reading an IRC or Usenet argument from the late 90s.
All true but it does seem the emotion of it has softened a lot since then. In general, people seem more open to choosing the best tool for the job and keeping a mix of devices if need be.
It helps that interoperability and common software (or at least competent alternatives) is dramatically better than it used to be, that you can comfortably and inexpensively run Windows or Linux in a VM almost anywhere, and the web got big. There was once a lot of friction to so much as moving a file.
Gaming beyond Windows and native big name productivity software for Linux remain pain points.
Macs (let's ignore the Mac Pro) are relatively far less expensive than they used to be. The price difference was eye-watering for a lot of years. Still premium but about on the level of premium PCs.
Agreed, and I'm far more concerned about the impact of the walled gardens between mobile app companies than the old desktop wars. At the moment, this feels like the nostalgia of a comfortable old debate between two elderly men sitting on a park bench.
Indeed, but Linux is crazy more popular now. Nearly all non-apple phones, all chromebooks, large fraction of servers, quite a few routers/switches, etc.
In the 90s there was much more non-Linux Unix, many more CPUs (not just Intel/AMD/ARM), and very few linux laptops.
Something like Ubuntu these days feels to me like Windows 7, which in my opinion was peak Windows. You can sit down, find your files, install software relatively easily, and the settings are pretty intuitive.
Obviously there are edge cases, but generally speaking, any random machine I've put Ubuntu on just works.
I usually don't have an issue installing Linux on a computer. The issue generally pops up when the recipient wants a piece of software that is only available on windows (which is also true for people migration to Macs). It's one thing to learn a new OS, but having to learn new software generally becomes the sticking point.
I know I'm in the minority, but I dislike the fact that they count me as a Windows user just because I bought a Dell laptop. First thing I did was to install Linux and ditch all the crapware that came with my machine.
In addition to reasons others have mentioned (lack of adware/bloatware, speed of Apple silicon) I think more and more users are realizing just how good the integration is in the Apple ecosystem (Airpods, universal copy and paste, Messages on desktop, etc). I'm one of the few who would consider moving to a Linux machine (talking about the general population, not HN), but I'd say the integrations are just such a nice part of my daily workflow.
Yeah this took me from a long time Linux user to Apple fanboy. It’s like a Linux that just works and has a pretty UI out of the box. I can sync with my phone and desktop without any work on my end.
At least in the two PCs I've recently researched, the Framework 13 and the X1 Carbon, I was surprised to learn that they both have a smaller battery (61Wh, 57Wh, respectively) than the 14 inch MacBook Pro (70Wh).
Is there anyone even trying to build a real competitor in that size class?
I think part of the problem is that even a 1:1 match for battery capacity won't yield anywhere near the same battery life, so why bother?
As a manufacturer you'd add significant weight and cost and still not be competitive with a MacBook's battery life.
Windows' laptop problems start with hardware, and a lost decade of mobile x86 chips failing to optimize for power efficiency, and a commensurate lack of investment in ARM alternatives after getting burned on Windows RT.
The X1 carbon is a full pound lighter than the MacBook Pro 14, and has decent battery life. It could have a significantly larger battery and still be lighter than the MacBook.
Yeah. They're fine for messing around/learning with keras/sklearn, but anything heavier than some light inference is going to be offloaded to a device with a discrete GPU.
"Light inference" insofar as inference that can actually run on consumer hardware.
MPS support is lacking in many ways, i.e. BF16 support is only arriving with Sonoma. One of the biggest things Nvidia has going for it is software maturity, CUDA is far beyond any alternative, particularly MPS. Many PyTorch optimizations only support Nvidia GPUs.
And the tensor core equivalents on Apple SoCs are in the ANE, which necessitates using CoreML. While unified memory bandwidth is impressive on Apple SoCs, it is still slower than recent gen Nvidia cards.
While the PPW certainly is impressive and the overall ML performance is impressive for laptop SoCs, Apple Silicon simply does not hold a candle to discrete GPU performance. You're correct, it can certainly run local inference on the memory-hungry, demanding LLMs that are en vogue currently, but you won't see the performance of a discrete GPU.
The unified memory lends itself to a cheaper, yet slower, alternative to DC-grade Nvidia cards with massive amounts of HBM, but there's a reason you don't see racks of Apple Silicon for LLM training, or even inference at scale.
I'm hopeful the software will vastly improve as Apple Silicon adoption grows, because I'd love to run some of the stuff I build for school on my MacBook, but for now I offload it to my desktop PC because the raw compute brings more value to me than the efficiency when due dates approach.
Thanks for the detailed reply, I've been reading about the tools, and tracking various forums discussing running local LLMs. ANE isn't required, just optional.
However the Apple M2 MAX GPU seems to do inference decently when using code targetting Metal (Apple's GPU API). Apparently inference on the llama 65B model with a M2 max happens at 5 tokens/sec. Not an amazing perf/$ for running inference at scale, but pretty interesting for a developer to tinker with. While the M2 Max with 96GB ram is slower than a 4090 it can run larger models and I'm not expecting to be particularly performance limited for home/local inference.
Yeah, the performance is honestly incredible for the (comparatively) poor software libraries, limited GPU cores, and low ceiling for power. I adore my MacBook Pro and find it to be more than enough for my current needs. It's been surprisingly performant for my transformers course this summer.
Apple Silicon is an even better deal for learning/tinkering with ML models if you already own one or plan to purchase one regardless. As you mentioned, the unified memory architecture is a cheaper alternative to massive/expensive Nvidia GPUs for running inference on larger models. The software is only going to improve, given the growing enthusiast cohort and Apple's push towards providing a solid ML development pipeline on MacOS.
Macs have excellent hardware, but obsolete software equivalent to what Windows and Linux had years ago. I wonder about how well Linux runs on the latest Mac hardware...
As a daily Mac and Windows user... I could write a large article, and when people ask me this, I always say a different thing - because there are too many. So there it is today's:
Leave my screen real estate alone, please get rid of this annoying menu bar that gets in the way when I'm trying to use the mouse to switch tabs in the application. This is UI thinking from the 1980s. It's very easy to misclick the tab because of the fine control skills required to avoid the menu bar. I don't want full screen because of my multi-monitor setup.
Interestingly, speaking of multimonitor... Connecting my M2 to my gaming monitor... Windows syncs with the monitor in 3 seconds, the Mac takes 10 seconds.
MacOS is still stuck in the 90s skeuomorphic design bs, and prevents users from changing any aspect of the UI to achieve a minimum of comfort and productivity.
The UI is buggy, pop-up windows steal focus all the time, window management is pretty much nonexistent, there are slow animations with laggy focus changes.
It may be fine for a soft user who just uses a browser, but trying to do any serious work on a mac is a nightmare compared to a modern tiling WM on linux.
Is it? I don't see anything on my desktop I'd consider skeumorphic.
Perhaps I'm privileged, but to me using multiple monitors each with a full focus, and swipe gestures to move between desktops, is as useful as any tiling WM.
For any "serious work" you'd spend 90% of the time in a terminal anyway, so that's not much of an issue tbh (ok, admittedly that's a very coder-centric perspective).
Those talking about "serious" work are usually gatekeepers.
Perhaps the revenue my code generates isn't "serious", but I'm happy to sit down at any Mac with Visual Studio Code and drag and drop my way to the bank instead of spending hours getting my dotfiles to artisanal perfection.
True, except that the weird Alt-Tabbing behaviour on Mac is not a bug, but it's supposed to work that way (it switches between applications - even applications that don't have any windows open). I don't like that behaviour either, but technically it's not a bug even if it feels like that when coming from other desktop environments.
With homebrew or a similar package manager that's not really an issue though? I'm pretty much on the bleeding edge of software versions for all my coder needs on my M1 Mac.
Most people are interested (by definition) in pop culture. My mom, an "average user", loves these little updates. That's actually why I mentioned Linux and Windows, they serve different parts of the spectrum a lot better (hardcore vs average) user.
You can see, right there in your statement, the problem with Macs: they cater to a wealthy coastal technology elite that believes they know better than everybody else.
Perhaps we are using different parts of the OS, but I find myself using my Mac intuitively in ways that would require some third-party utilities or digging around in the Control Panel. For example, throwing a browser window up on a mid-range smart TV using AirPlay without plugging in any cables. Reading my text messages on the desktop. Even copy and paste in the terminal without having to use an extra modifier key.
I hope Microsoft quickly finds a solution to move to RISC. I don't care about compatibility with older software. I want the battery life without having to move to MacOS and using it's awful window management.
If window management is the only thing holding you back, look into the third party UI helper app scene. There have been lots of them—Rectangle for example. https://rectangleapp.com/
I haven't used Windows for a while, but back in the day, it did not provide any extra capabilities in this regard over MacOS. Now I use an extension to tile the desktop with windows, and it works great.
Windows does have some more built-in window tools these days -- it lets you snap windows into various parts of the screen by dragging them up against the edges. You can replicate that on macOS with apps like Rectangle.
More-controversial is the different behavior of cmd-tab between Mac and Windows (app-level vs window-level). Once you learn that cmd-` also exists for switching between windows inside an app, I find it's a matter of personal preference and you can make arguments either way about which one is "better"...
> Once you learn that cmd-` also exists for switching between windows inside an app, I find it's a matter of personal preference and you can make arguments either way about which one is "better"...
Here is an example of how the app-centric model of task switching is problematic beyond personal preference: it causes focus stealing when opening GUI windows from the CLI. The apps themselves have to (partially, because that's the best they can do) work around the window manager's broken behavior.
The final answer from the initiated seems to be 'you're holding it wrong'. So here we have a Certified Unix™ where something as banal as setting your $EDITOR to a GUI program is broken by default and even when 'fixed' causes your window order to be shuffled around.
macOS window management is "application centric", while Windows and most Linux desktops are "window centric". Mac is my primary platform since a decade now, but I still find that particular aspect quite awkward, old time Mac users seem to like it though (it's not much of an issue for me since I don't use many UI apps anyway besides iTerm2, Chrome and VSCode).
I highly doubt they ever will. Their insistance on baking in legacy support to modern Windows is their biggest downfall. Because of that every installation of Windows will always need to be backwards compatible and carry that burden.
Supported is probably the wrong term. Tolerated might be better. Whilst Windows runs on it theres very little there beyond the usual Microsoft standard of "yep we did it, whats next" and ignoring the platform.
Making it work on ARM is one thing, making it work well, and supporting the platform are a far more important part of the puzzle.
I think this could be handled more elegantly, as Apple has been able to make x86 compatibility better and more performant than quite a bit of actual x86 silicon… for MS, the backward compat of their software stack is rather important for enterprise customers.
Honestly tho, I find modern Windows infuriating to use without stripping it down quite a bit. Tiny11 is a lifesaver.
> I think this could be handled more elegantly, as Apple has been able to make x86 compatibility better and more performant than quite a bit of actual x86 silicon.
I wouldn’t count on this being the case going forward. Let’s not forget that some 4 years ago Apple decided to completely drop support for 32-bit apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 5-8 years time they decide to drop support for anything x86.
Apple hates supporting legacy crap. The exact moment when the vast majority of the recently updated Mac apps will have ARM builds, Apple will just set a release some years in the future that will kill native x86 support and that will be the end of it.
