I don't like Apple but they ship their devices with everything a basic user needs and if a high quality, completely for free. When you get a MacBook you don't need to worry about finding and downloading an external app for almost anything - from viewing any kind of file, to basic photo and video editing, to document processing, etc. And they don't track every minute thing you do and act like malware to try to make you use their products.
While that's true, most windows laptops of similar build quality and form factor are around the same price. Windows also advertises to you and installs unwanted apps on your computer without modifications. Of course, you could always install Linux.
That's nowhere near as true as it once was. Most of your big well-supoorted distros run flawlessly on most big brand machines.
Where you'll run into problems is in using more obscure distros that require a lot of tweaking and customization, but something like Ubuntu should run beautifully out of the box and if it does have a problem it will be very well-known and heavily documented with easy to follow step by step instructions on fixing it. Linux just isn't the pain in the ass it used to be. Or at least it doesn't have to be.
Big brands like Lenovo, Dell, Intel work with Ubuntu pretty fine, there are compatibility tests for distros. I blind installed openSuse (after running Ubuntu beside W11) on my Lenovo Yoga from 2020 without issue aside from fingerprint scanner. All my NUCs have been great on Linux.
None that offer similar quality across the board in display, speakers, input devices, performance, battery life. Trust me I've looked. Alternative laptops aren't really any cheaper any more unless you get something of significantly lesser quality, in which case there's nothing surprising about that - something worse is cheaper.
Isn’t apple consistently removing ports on their newer products? I thought that was a common complaint.
It’s genuinely been ages since i’ve heard anyone try to defend the pricing of apple products for anything other than luxury purchases or rich people products. They’re vastly overpriced and underpowered, and they’re locked into the apple ecosystem. If you aren’t buying apple products for everything, suddenly a lot of shit doesn’t “just work” anymore lmao
Except that businesses always find a way to lock themselves (and you) with Office, so regardless of all the chimes and stuff that come standard with your Mac you will still have to install Word because some exec somewhere might want to make some comments in your document in the form of highlighted, inline text instead of actual side comments.
You sure about that? I just bought my mom a new iPad Air yesterday and the setup process was maddeningly privacy invading. Name, address, and phone number just to install anything from the Apple store. Both me and my mom, who's not tech savvy at all, thought it was crazy the amount of info we had to put in just to get a usable device.
and act like malware to try to make you use their products.
There was also so many preloaded garbage apps installed by default. Why are apps like Measure there? Yes when I want to measure something...I reach for an iPad...instead of...you know...a tape measure... Just because they're first party apps doesn't make this okay. Also, Apple's ecosystem is famous for vendor lock-in.
They may not be as blatant about it as Google is, but they're every bit as bad tbh.
eh I use Linux on my desktop but macOS is a nicely polished UNIX operating system. It's only locked down for average users, you can usually get away with a quick sudo or worst-case going into single user mode and disabling some system protections.
I definitely prefer using *nix operating systems, and macOS gives me that for portable computing. I'm still more productive on Linux, but it's not too far apart.
They weren't investigated for antitrust for baking stuff into the OS - it was for monopolizing various sectors and strong arming users and competitors. They're allowed to have their own browser preinstalled, they just have to let you switch easily and remove it etc.
They are literally in the process of needing to unbundle Teams from office in Europe.
Regardless of the reasoning, MS has had eyes on it since the 90s and need to be incredibly careful what they do and don't bundle together or preinstall. Whereas Apple can do whatever they want. That is why Apple comes with a bunch of shitty office products that only one person at any given company uses and Windows comes with a link to download them.
What's the MacBook equivalent of MS Paint? Open it, paste from clipboard, and then do a simple crop/edit? I was looking to do this the other day and nothing seemed to work.
I don't think Macs are as batteries included as some people think.
Gotta disagree. MS Paint is so blisteringly straightforward for how to use it. Google pointed me towards Preview but there was no menu option to create a new image from the clipboard contents. And then for editing, there was no easy to use tooltray that gives you everything you need right from the start. You could crop and such by going to through menu but you could feel the app hating you for trying to use it that way.