Not to get all Apple-apologia, but my wife's old Macbook is still going strong for casual use (email, video streaming, web browsing) after nearly a decade.
Not really a badge of honor or anything, just that it takes a lot to bog down even substandard out of date hardware to a noticable degree if you don't do a ton on it in the first place.
I personally like the aluminum case. It keeps them alive longer than plastic laptops.
On the inside its just like any other laptop except more solder points between the components (I used to do repair work on them). And they can sell more used since everyone wants to pay the apple tax.
The Framework laptop the fox talks about is also a metal case. With captive screws and easily replaceable/upgradeable components - and several generations of upgrades already available to build trust that they really do intend to support that upgradeabiliy over time.
my wife's old Macbook is still going strong for casual use
As is the 500 dollar Acer laptop I bought in 2016 lol But yeah, my wife had wanted a MacBook Pro for a very long time. We finally had the money for it in 2019 so we got that laptop for her. In order to play games on it, I had to give her one of my Windows keys and learn how to set up Boot Camp. It's actually a perfectly serviceable gaming laptop.
She loves it. It's still holding up very well. But was it worth $2,700? Not to me. But then again, my '97 Honda probably isn't worth the $2,700 I paid for it to her, either. I don't understand why she wants overly expensive computers. She doesn't understand why I want overly crappy cars. But we did say for better or worse so here we are lol
I've got a top-of-the-line 2015 Macbook Pro that works well today. I also don't understand why Macbooks are held as mutually exclusive to Linux. They're just a computer, plug in your bootable Linux USB and install it. I've got Linux on mine and it works decently.
Unfortunately that’s not really true since the M1 series, because there were no drivers for any of the custom Apple hardware. There is a purpose built Apple Sillicon distro but it doesn’t even run on M3 or M4 macs yet.
They’re a bit more sluggish than they were on High Sierra, but everything works well enough. For some reason I couldn’t get the latest version to work but a previous one worked great (1.5 vs 2.2)
I have one similar to that 😃 I have set up a dual boot with EndeavourOS to get security updates there
(Prepare partition in macOS by shrinking main and make a second FAT. You’ll change the file system to the correct one during installation of Linux. At reboot hold alt/option to choose which OS/USB-Stick to boot)
With the macOS, I want to try legacy patcher, but would have to kill my Linux in the process, so I did not try it yet..
I hate Apple with passion, but my GF has a 2013 Macbook, that is still getting security updates and is totally usable.
I replaced the spinning hard drive a while ago with a fast SSD, while using Clonezilla to copy the content and partitions of the drive.
And you know what? It started like a rocket. It has an Intel CPU, but I don't think installing Linux would have made it much better, especially UX wise.
MacOS is more than half the reason most people buy a Mac and not a cheap laptop.
Still nice meme tho. It's way more relatable than I want to admit it.
I'm using a new M3 MBP at work and it literally brought my compile time from 20+ minutes on a pretty beefy Windows machine down to about 6 minutes. Based on that alone, it's hard to imagine using anything else for serious dev work at this point.
Having said that, there's a lot of goofy Apple fuckery going on too. Multi-monitor support is limited to two displays, so if you want more than that you're stuck with an expensive third-party dock and DisplayLink drivers, which cause color artifacting in high motion like you'd expect from a heavily compressed video, which leads to eye strain. Mouse support is terrible without a third party app to fix the goofy scroll wheel acceleration curve they've built in, and even buying first-party peripherals doesn't solve it. I need a third party app just to prevent Mac OS from opening iTunes every time I connect a Bluetooth headset... So many little dumb things to deal with.
Asahi’s pretty decent now, so far as I’m concerned. They’ve still not cracked having more than one display, but otherwise I can’t think of anything I’ve not been able to do with it.
This is one of my favorite blogposts of all time. It is an extremely well written, in depth writeup of several security vulnerabilties of a popular app.
It also opens with:
Please keep in mind that this website is a furry blog, first and foremost, that sometimes happens to cover security and cryptography topics.
Author-activist Cory Doctorow does a daily thread on Mastodon (on stuff like tech policy) but because each post doesn't have much text the threads get long. He also posts it on his blog, but I think Brewchin finds the thread annoying. His account: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic
I can do indie grade game development on an M1 MacBook air. It's wild how tech has progressed.
But I do my day job work on a Linux mint laptop and have a windows gaming pc until such time as I can fuck that useless piece of shit software into the fucking ether where it belongs.
Right now none specifically, but I haven't really done an audit. I understand it's pretty good nowadays with proton.
What I don't want is to accidentally play an unsupported game and get vac banned or something.
If stellaris, total war and a handful of others worked I could probably convince myself to look into dual booting to try it out. I imagine OBS is fine. Streamdeck works on Mac so might be ok.
FFXI for me. It's a lot better post Steam Deck, but last time I set it up on Linux (maybe a year ago) a lot of the visual mods that are registry-based weren't working properly, the font rendering was awful, and certain addons and plugins just didn't work (guildwork in particular since it launches a background exe, others related to showing/hiding certain UI elements.) It runs, but it's far from comfortable. Might be good enough in a VM and I'll probably try again next time I resubscribe.
It's not even that. The character is a transgender furry. It pretty much represents what Linux is. You have the freedom to modify it and customize it to make it whatever you want it to be and make it yours.