I’m gonna have to argue against a few of these points:

When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board.

Consistent: yes. Every Apple device leverages a functionally very similar UI. That said, the experience is, in my opinion, not very coherent or well thought out. Especially if you are attempting to leverage their technology from the standpoint of someone like a Linux power user. The default user experience is frustratingly warped around the idea that the end user is an idiot who has no idea how to use a terminal and who only wants access to the default applications provided with the OS.

Things work well

Things work…okay. But try installing, uninstalling, and then reinstalling a MySQL DB on a macbook and then spend an hour figuring out why your installation is broken. Admittedly, that’s because you’re probably installing it with Homebrew, but that’s the other point: if you want to do anything of value on it, you have to use a third party application like Homebrew to do it. The fact that you have to install and leverage a third party package manager is unhinged for an ecosystem where everything is so “bundled” together by default.

Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.

I guess the ultimate perspective is one in which you have to be happy surrendering control over so much to Apple. But then again, you could also just install EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma or any given flavor of Debian distribution with any DE of your choice, install KDE Connect on your PC and phone, and get 95 percent of the experience Apple offers right out of the box, with about 100x the control over your system.

I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore.

I don’t know of anyone who would describe themselves as a hardcore “PC/Linux user,” or what this means to you. I’m assuming by PC you mean Windows. But people who are really into Linux generally don’t like MacOS or Windows, and typically for all the same reasons. I tolerate a Windows machine for video game purposes, but if I had to use it for work I’d immediately install Virtualbox and work out of a Linux VM. For the people who are really into Linux, the management of the different parts of it is, while sometimes a pain in the ass, also part of the fun. It’s the innate challenge of something that can only be mastered by technical proficiency. If that’s not for you, totally fine.

The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it.

It’s less argument and more of a general negative sentiment people hold towards Apple product advocates. You can look up the phenomenon of “green bubble discrimination.” It’s a vicious cycle in which the ecosystem works seamlessly for people who are a part of it, but Apple intentionally makes leaving that ecosystem difficult and intentionally draws attention to those who interact with the people inside of it who are not part of it. Apple products also often are associated with a higher price tag: they’re status symbols as much as they are functional tools. People recognize a 2000 dollar Macbook instantly. Only a few people might recognize a comparably priced Thinkpad. In a lot of cases, they’ll just assume the Macbook was expensive and the non-Macbook was cheap. And you might say, “yeah, but that’s because of people, not because of Mac.” But it would be a lie to say that Apple isn’t a company intensely invested in brand recognition and that it doesn’t know it actively profits from these perceptions.

Yea sorry but I disagree with the vast majority of things you said. Consistent, coherent, and well thought out experiences are pretty par for the course at this point, regardless of what flagship phone company you’re buying from. The UX is great for people who grow up with the UX, just like android UX is great for people who grow up with it. Android users who switch to Apple generally think Apple’s UX is dogshit, and vice versa. The UX argument is trash and the reality of it is that people just think whatever UX they’re used to is the more intuitive one. Support is pretty much the same in my experience between the two, and I have an android personal phone and an apple work phone. The major difference is the image that Apple support airs is better. The vast majority of popular Android applications are just as stable and usable as Apple apps, and the ones that aren’t are often niche enough that similar apps aren’t even on the apple appstore. So it’s a question of basically the same service for most apps, and then either no service or degraded service for lesser apps.

The one thing they have over android is the security argument, which is fair to an extent, but not this bulwark that a lot of people like to pretend it is. The Fappening, for example, still got plenty of explicit images from Apple phones.

All in all, apple is an advertising company first, and a tech company second, with admittedly improved security, but also admittedly security that isn’t good enough to justify the price hike.

And paging in & out of RAM frequently is probably one of the quickest ways to wear out the NAND.

Put it all together and you have a system that breaks itself and can’t be repaired. The less RAM you buy the quicker the NAND will break.

I was under the impression that had been solved by third parties? Or is chip cloning not enough?

You know I have software on my PC old enough I can’t run it even in compatibility mode, I’d need to spin up a VM to run it or a pseudoVM like DOSBox, it’s not unheard of it’s not even uncommon.

USB 2.0 in 2023 LOL LOL LOL LOL

yeah, I forgot about that, it’s a USB-C type port.

I think that decision makes sense.

What you said got me worried, so I looked into the claim that it is “tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides”. That’s a convincing concern, and you’ve changed my mind on this. I don’t see any evidence that they’re doing anything close to this level of tracking — the main thing they seem to track is your Mac App Store usage — but they may have the potential to do so in the enshittified future. That gives me pause.

I don’t necessarily even begrudge them a profit margin on RAM. Sure it’s kind of a scam but also I guess it’s just the price you pay for convenience. If you want to better price you upgrade the RAM yourself (assuming that was actually possible).

But the markup they have on RAM isn’t reasonable it’s totally insane.

If you went to McDonald’s and cheeseburger was $0.99 and then a cheeseburger with extra cheese was $2 do you think was something was up but that’s essentially what Apple are doing. Cheese does not cost $1.99, you are literally almost doubling the price for a subcomponent

But you still cannot do it outside of a virtual box right?

So you will still be at the behest of the AppleOS.

It’s not virtualization. It’s actually booted and runs on bare metal, same as the way Windows runs on a normal Windows computer: a proprietary closed UEFI firmware handles the boot process but boots an OS from the “hard drive” portion of non-volatile storage (usually an SSD on Windows machines). Whether you run Linux or Windows, that boot process starts the same.

Except the boot process on a non apple PC is open software. You can create custom a bios revision. The firmware on an apple computer is not open source. AFAIK you cannot create a custom bios on an apple computer.

Apple’s base configurations are generally cheaper than similarly specced competitors, because their CPU/GPUs are so much cheaper than similar Intel/AMD/Nvidia chips.

No idea what you mean by this. You cannot buy Apple’s hardware due the restrictions Apple places on any purchases. Any hardware you can buy from Apple has a premium.

Apple leans heavily on the display being good on an Apple but imo it does not make up for the pricing. There is a good guide on better alternatives here.

If you’re already going to buy a laptop with a high quality HiDPI display, and are looking for high performance from your CPU/GPU, it takes a decent amount of storage/memory for a Macbook to overtake a similarly specced competitor in price.

I think you mean that Apple uses its own memory more effectively then a windows PC does. Yes it does, but memory is not that expensive to make. To increase the storage space from 256GB to 512 is £200. I can buy a 2TB drive for that. More importantly, it can be replaced when it wears out. Apple give you a replacement price that means you need a new computer.

Apple computers are designed to make repairs expensive. They may have pseudo adopted the right to repair, but let us see how that goes before believing the hype.

Interesting, I thought they had ditched the ARM license completely, my mistake.

Here’s an example for that: Apple needed to ship an x86_64 emulator for the transition, but that’s slow and thus make the new machines appear much slower than their older Intel-based ones. So, what they did was to come up with their own private instructions that an emulator needs to greatly speed up its task and added them to the chip. Now, most people don’t even know whether they run native or emulated programs, because the difference in performance is so minimal.

Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if/when Microsoft is going to hop on the RISC train. They did a crap job trying themselves at a ARM version a few years back and gave up. A RISC Surface with a compatible Windows 13 and proper binary translator (like Apple did with Rosetta) would shake the PC market real good!