The vast majority of comments here complaining about Mac and macOS specifically seem to stem from really, really not understanding much about them. This comment is unfortunately not any different.

I’ve seen developers working for FAANGs unironically praise the M1 Macbooks as work machines.

The FAANG companies that fight tooth and nail to hire the best people who can basically work wherever they want because of their skill like Macs? Surely, they’re the dumb ones.

I have one and the damn thing has an option to change the “modifier key” for the fucking mouse

Originally, and for quite a while (probably early 2000’s) Macs shipped with a one button mouse, and there was no concept of a “right-click.” Originally, they were pretty dogmatic that the OS should be simple enough that one button was enough. You shouldn’t need to hide functionality in a context menu, it should be available through the standard UI. Eventually, that lost out, but they decided they wanted to make context menus* (or other “right-click” actions) a power user feature, rather than a default. So the decided to make it make sense for all of the machines that had always shipped with one button mice, you could hold ctrl and then click an item and you’d get the context menu. For decades now, they support right click, but if you built up years of muscle memory around ctrl+clicking instead, you still can.

like press the meta key

You like the meta key? Probably better thank Apple. Apple has had a “meta” key basically forever, only it’s been called “command.” I’m old enough to remember when more manufacturers started to add their own meta keys. If you go grab an older keyboard, you’ll probably find they also have a “context menu” button, which is basically a “right-click” and you almost def won’t find one now.

you want to do basic window manager things

Lots of people in this thread seem to really, really like being able to window snap, which I kind of get but also generally disagree with. macOS (again, going back a thousand years) has a different philosophy when it comes to managing windows. On [MS] Windows, pretty much all software aims for full screen, and users def do the same. Window snapping now means you have a convenient way to see 2 whole things. If you really, really want window snapping similar to how MS does it, there are a hojillion ways to accomplish this with very simple app installs. macOS has instead tried to make it so that you can manage multiple apps/windows easily without full screen, going back to tiny, tiny screens.

But let’s talk about “basic window manager things” for a sec. Windows has easily, and I mean easily had the worst window management generally for like 2 decades. Windows 10 and Windows 11 help catch up to things I switched off of Windows and to Linux for in like, 2004. Expose, or “Task View” as it’s now called in Windows started in macOS, and was adopted in Linux in the mid 2000’s. Not until Windows 10, and not even the first version, do we get that. Ditto for virtual desktops. In Windows, I can press alt-tab and switch between any open app. In macOS, I can press cmd+tab and switch between any open app, but I can also press cmd-` and switch between an app’s windows. In Windows, I can minimize windows to the task bar just as I can in macOS. However, I can also just choose to hide all app windows, or hide all windows except the app I’m looking at. And on macOS, I can use hot corners (which Windows barely touches with its “show desktop” hotcorner, sort of) which I can configure however I want. I can throw my mouse in any corner of the screen and get more “basic window manager things” than exist on Windows.

Its keyboard is that weird, unresponsive, flat form factor that makes it a nightmare to actually use as a portable device

If you have one the bad butterfly keyboards, yes. If not, this is nonsense. All laptop keyboards are bad, mac versions (with the very large caveat that the butterfly keyboards were insanely stupid/bad) are generally better.

I get that it’s a relatively powerful computer for the ludicrous amount of battery life it gives you, but that’s purely because it’s an extremely optimized ARM based processor that’s only designed to work with this specific operating system.

How is this supposed to be a negative? If we zoom out a little, this comment might as well be “oh sure, you can get your fancy graphic effects when you use a, what did you call it? graphics processing unit?” And even then, this is still not really accurately understanding why Apple has absolutely dominated CPU in mobile, and then is crushing in the class of laptop/desktop processors it competes in.**

But Apple is practically an antonym for FOSS at this point.

Aside from darwin, the kernel macOS runs on, Webkit, the browser engine that Chrome forked from, or passkeys, the thing that might replace passwords, you’re still really wrong.

Beyond those complaints, it’s got good speakers and never produces any heat. Honestly, the only good things about the machines are those hardware elements: the speakers, battery life, and lack of heat.

How about screens? Trackpad? Physical material, etc?

I also have a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, which is physically a worse machine: it gets hot, has a fraction of the battery life, etc.

“I can get vastly less done, and it’s going to be more uncomfortable the entire time.”

I wonder if the people that really like the M1s like them because it’s the laptop equivalent of an iPhone.

Lots of misunderstanding here, but I’m already a phone book in.

* really, they probably never would have added right clicks, but as more software adopted right click actions, especially cross platform stuff like Adobe software, they pretty much had to.
** they’ve basically ceded the extreme high end. If you really want the most performant CPU and power\heat aren’t a concern, it’s not Apple.

It’s not really because the developers are cheaper, it’s because the vast reduction in complexity is cheaper. Let’s say you’ve got a great general app idea and you’re going to build a startup. Your app is going to have to be mobile and desktop. To do that well, natively, this means:

• you’re going to need a backend dev who are probably going to be building APIs that are touching on web tech.
• You’re going to need a developer team who can target Apple platforms, Android, and Windows. I lump Apple together here because although it’s not entirely fair to say that it’s as simple as they promise where you just click a box and your iOS app works on macOS, you’re at least able to work in the same general toolset (Swift, SwiftUI, Xcode, etc.)
• You’re going to need designers who can design to the specific needs of the platforms, which is also going to mean more domain expertise.
• testing for each of those platforms.
• This is true regardless, but you’re going to have to deal with more platform-specific support. More platform specific documentation, etc. How do you do think x on platform y? Where is the button on this platform vs that one?
• maintaining feature parity as you continue to build is going to be much more difficult, and you’re going to have to decide if you want to maintain feature parity and slow the whole process, or give up and launch on some platforms first (hopefully there is no one that uses a Mac and an Android phone or Windows and an iPhone or an iPhone and a Samsung Tablet or that gets annoying real fast.)

In short, moving from one platform to two natively doesn’t double complexity and cost, it’s far, far worse than that. It’s not that a good web dev costs $70k vs an iOS dev that makes $90k, it’s that a good iOS dev costs $90k, and a good Android dev costs $85k, and a good Windows dev costs $80k and one of those people hopefully is familiar enough with each platform to be the team lead so you can tack on another $20k for them…

And all the while you’re building that team and building your 3 different platform native apps, a competitor or several will launch on Electron and web tech and take the market because no one except us nerds give a shit about whether something is using the right platform idiom or even knows what they are, and far fewer still have any idea how to check RAM usage and the like.

You know, as an amateur with massive impostor syndrome who’s probably going to be applying for jobs soon, this comment and those like it give me strength.