Why are so many people buying Apple Hardware? I don't get it...

2025-04-30 18:02 CEST

I don't get... I simply don't get it...

Why are people still buying Apple Hardware? No, this is not an article about a sour kid who isn't able to buy expensive Apple Hardware, and therefore it hates the complete brand (at one time, I was that kid). This is an article about a developer who used for a very long time Apple products, switched to Linux and is forced to use Apple again, and is completely frustrated about everything.

I always switched between different devices and operating systems, and I loved that switching. Always try and learn about new things, I really liked it. I did this for many years. I tried really everything. I was distro hopping on Linux, used Windows XP, Vista, 7, 10 and 11. And I used Mac OS, until OSX and now again Mac OS. Even Android and iOS. I tried everything, and it was a fun experience to tinker with every piece of software I could find.

Now, I'm a bit older and I "settled" with Kubuntu, and I'm using it now for about 5 years. Everything works as expected and I had - nearly - zero issues.

To be fair, my use cases are fairly simple:

That's it. I think that's mostly my work I do on a computer nowadays. Sure, I do some funny things in my spare time, but I won't list them because those are things where I'm okay with tinkering around.

Last Year in November, I switched to a new company, which ONLY offers Mac as an option to work with. I thought that's not a big deal because I already used Mac before. In fact, I already own an M1 Mac Mini, but I never touched it really. I use it only to compile iOS-Apps, which I did maybe 10 times in 2 years.

Now, that I'm using Mac daily... Oh boy was I wrong. Was Mac really that bad? This time I constantly get issues and have to research problems online. Believe it or not, more than Linux. This is astonishingly bad because Mac was my Heaven after Vista. Little side note: With my first paycheck I bought back in the days a new laptop with my very first own money. Which had, at this time, Vista preinstalled. Proud as fuck, I bought the laptop, got home, unpacked it, booted it up. And after 5 Minutes... Bluescreen. WTF?! This thing is brand new... So I tried again... Booted it up and after 5 Minutes I got the same Bluescreen. That was the first blue screen I saw in years. I maybe write about that topic, too. Samsung is way worse than you might think. So I went back to the electronics shop and returned it. The seller went, "Yeah, Vista is not that stable". After a short conversation, he suggested that I could buy a Macbook instead. I was quite pissed because the Macbook was wayyyy more expensive, but I bought it anyway. I did not only use my first paycheck, I tanked my whole bank account for this Macbook. The seller was right, the Macbook was good, really, really good, I kept it for many years. Worked on it, played WoW on it and everything worked great. I even paid for the OSX Upgrade to Snow Leopard. All in all, it was an exceptionally well machine and OS, and I keep it in good memory.

Back to the present - Mac OS as for now has so many issues, that the idea for this article sparked. And every issue is so absurd, that I often shook my head and laughed about it.

I have a 3D Printer, and therefore I slice with orca slicer a STL file, and then I must copy the generated gcode file to a SD card so that my printer can print the file from it. So the request is fairly simple, I have a file and I want to copy that file to a mounted SD card. So I stick my SD card into a SD card reader stick and stick it into the mac. Nothing happens... What? Do I have to do something? Therefore, again, I removed the stick and put it back in the USB c port. Still nothing... But the light on the stick lights up? Maybe another port works? Still nothing... So I googled. Long story short, I didn't manage to mount the SD card properly. Perhaps the card or the reader is broken? So I tried my laptop with Kubuntu. Power on the laptop, sticked in the SD card reader with the SD card. It shows up in the task bar, clicked on it, it was mounted, and I was able to copy the file to the SD card. With no single fucking issue... I have some friends who are using macs in the last few years, so I asked them what I did wrong. "What SD card reader you used?" "I don't know, some no name reader I had lying around" "Yeah, that should it be. Maybe you buy a more expensive one, who is tested with mac" - What the fuck? Are you insane? It works on Windows and on Linux.

Next thing. I have a quite heavy backup routine with my servers. I back up to a SFTP server, to a s3, and onto another machine. Yearly, I save one single backup of all my servers on physical media. That means on Blu-ray and on an external SSD.

I mounted my external SSD onto the mac mini via USB c and tried to copy some large files to the SSD. The speed was in the beginning good, but it got terrible very soon. So bad, that I needed to wait for days to complete the copy process. No way... So I googled. Some people went, maybe your cable isn't capable for high-speed transfer. I thought they were right because I used some random USB cable I had lying around. Therefore, I searched for the original cable which was delivered together with the SSD. Still the same issue. I found out, that NTFS is really slow on Mac and I should reformat it with a "better" format. So I tried exFAT, same issue. And then I should reformat it with an apple format, which I did not because I want to use the drive on other systems, too... So same again, I went to my laptop, booted into Kubuntu. Copied the file with a good speed to the drive and moved on.

Next thing... That issue is a bit older but still exists to this day. I got a customer, who is "kind of developer". He designs websites for customers and knows how to code, but sometimes he needs help if he "fucks up" the code. He mostly changes CSS and HTML. His app is very old, so we dockerized it, so that new developers must not tinker with special installation workflows. I work on Linux and everything is fine, and on the server the app runs dockerized pretty well, too. The app is a website builder with many different themes, every theme is SASS and needs to be compiled to CSS on deployment. So many IO operations on the local machine on deployment. As I said, on my linux machine, everything works well.
After we dockerized the app, after a few months, my customer tried the deployment on his mac. The deployment took about 15 minutes, and he immediately calls me and asks if I could check what the problem is. If you search for "docker on mac slow" on google you get a shitload of results. One as an example.
There are many articles on how to improve the situation, but in some use cases - you can't. So, to sum up. Docker on Mac has not a good performance.

Now, after I switched my job back in November, I got sent a very beefy Macbook. A Macbook Pro with a M1 Max Processor, nearly maxed out notebook. I got a dock so that I'm able to use my screens I got on my desk. I have two 32-inch 1440p screens, which I really love. I was quite pumped to turn on the Macbook and try its performance. So I hooked up the screens and turned on the Macbook and set up my user account and installed my dev setup. In the beginning, I was shocked how everything was displayed, it was very blurry and washed out, not what I had known my screens for. You guessed it.... I googled... Here is the result. I sum up: Mac is not optimized for 1440p you need a tweak app which you need to buy, and then you get - maybe - a better picture out of your screen. BTW, this said app, scales the resolution DOWN to a resolution mac is optimized for.

WHAT . THE . ACTUAL . FUCK . IS . WRONG. WITH . YOU . IN . CUPERTINO?!

... AND ...

WHAT . THE . ACTUAL . FUCK . IS . WRONG . WITH . YOU . GUYS . BUYING . APPLE . HARDWARE?!

... except the people who don't know about these problems. I mean the people who constantly defend Apple for this mess.

We are talking about a laptop, that cost my employer about 4 to 5 fucking grand. And it even couldn't display 1440p right.

I'm done...

Apple... Fix your shit!