Apple laptops have become garbage

When OSX launched it quite quickly attracted a lot of Linux users and developers. There were three main reason for this:

1. Everything worked out of the box
2. The hardware was great, even sexy
3. It was a full Unix laptop

It is interesting, then, that none of these things really hold true any more.

Everything works out of the box

I have an Android phone. One of the things one would like to do with it is to take pictures and then transfer them to a computer. On Linux and Windows this is straightforward: you plug in the USB cable, select "share pictures" on the phone and the operating system pops up a file dialog. Very simple.

In OSX this does not work. Because Android is a competitor to the iPhone (which makes Apple most of its money nowadays) it is in Apple's business interest to not work together with competing products. They have actively and purposefully chosen to make things worse for you, the paying customer, for their own gain. Google provides a file transfer helper application but since it is not hooked inside the OS its UX is not very good.

But let's say you personally don't care about that. Maybe you are a fully satisfied iPhone user. Very well, let's look at something completely different: external monitors. In this year's Europython conference introductory presentation the speaker took the time to explicitly say that if anyone presenting had a latest model Macbook Pro, it would not work with the venue's projectors. Things have really turned on their heads because up to a few years ago Macs were pretty much the only laptops that always worked.

This problem is not limited to projectors. At home I have an HP monitor that has been connected to many a different video source and it has worked flawlessly. The only exception is the new work laptop. Connecting it to this monitor makes the system go completely wonky. On every connection it does an impressive impersonation of the dance floor of a german gay bar with colors flickering, things switching on and off and changing size for about ten seconds or so. Then it works. Until the screen saver kicks in and the whole cycle repeats.

If this was not enough every now and then the terminal application crashes. It just goes completely blank and does not respond to anything. This is a fairly impressive feat for an application that reached feature stability in 1993 or thereabouts.

Great hardware

One of the things I do in my day job is mobile app development (specifically Android). This means connecting external display, mouse and keyboard to the work laptop. Since macs have only two USB ports they are already fully taken and there is nowhere to plug the development phone. The choices here are to either unplug the mouse whenever you need to deploy or debug on the device or use a USB hub.

Using dongles for connectivity is annoying but at least with a hub one can get things working. Except no. I have a nice USB hub that I have used for many years on many devices that works like a charm. Except on this work computer. Connecting anything through that hub causes something to break so the keyboard stops working every two minutes. The only solution is to unplug the hub and then replug it again. Or, more specifically, not to use the hub but instead live without an external mouse. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that Apple was the main pioneer for driving USB adoption back in the day.

Newer laptop models are even worse. They have only USB-C connectors and each consecutive model seems to have fewer and fewer of them. Maybe their eventual goal is to have a laptop with no external connection slots, not even a battery charger port. The machine would ship from the factory pre-charged and once the juice runs out (with up to 10 hours of battery life™) you have to throw it away and buy a new one. It would make for good business.

After the introduction of the Retina display (which is awesome) the only notable hardware innovation has been the emojibar. It took the concept of function buttons and made it worse.

Full Unix support

When OSX launched it was a great Unix platform. It still is pretty much the same it was then, but by modern standards it is ridiculously outdated. There is no Python 3 out of the box, and Python 2 is several versions behind the latest upstream release. Other tools are even worse. Perl is 5.18 from 2014 or so, Bash is 3.2 with the copyright year of 2007, Emacs from 2014 and Vim from 2013. This is annoying even for people who don't use macs, but just maintain software that supports OSX. Having to maintain compatibility with these sorts of stone age tools is not fun.

What is causing this dip in quality?

There are many things one could say about the current state of affairs. However there is already someone who has put it into words much more eloquently than any of us ever could. Take it away, Steve:

Post scriptum

Yes, this blog post was written on a Macbook, but it is one of the older models which were still good. I personally need to maintain a piece of software that has native support for OSX so I'm probably going to keep on using it for the foreseeable future. That being said if someone starts selling a laptop with a Risc-V processor, a retina-level display and a matte screen, I'm probably going to be first in line to get one.