Under duress, I bought a Macbook. It’s 6 goddamned years old and still cost me $550.
I’m not even that mad.
Turns out, the vast majority of my day-to-day bullshit (aka non-work) is done in a browser anyway. Install Chrome, sync, done. Groovy.
Work (well, education currently) stuff…man, life is so much better on a *nix system than it is on Windows.
Hardware…this six-year-old MBP is more than capable of doing everything I ask it to (aside from graphics card stuff, which is not the point of a work laptop) and the whole user experience just shits all over every Windows machine I’ve ever used (disclaimer: haven’t messed with a Surface, but still).
I didn’t believe that the modern OSes had that much daylight between them in terms of usability. And that’s largely…ish…true for a desktop/workstation setting. But on a laptop? Ye gods. The three-finger-swipe for switching between fullscreen apps alone is worth a hundred-dollar premium, no exaggeration. And there’s lots more where that came from.
There may well be a Linux distro + window manager that accomplishes much of what I appreciate of this MBP, but I’d be surprised.
And the hardware…my goodness, the hardware. Every last single damn bit of it is great.
I am so grumpy. Fuck Apple, for so very many reasons. Fuck their whole business model. Fuck iOS in particular. But hell if this laptop isn’t far and away the best laptop I’ve ever used.
Glad you enjoy it. I’m as big an Apple hater as anyone I know but I’d love to own a MacBook. The only problem is that I also need to own a Windows notebook and I can’t afford to own both, not with the prices Apple charges. On the other hand, if you can by a laptop and use it for 6 years and then sell it for $550 then perhaps it isn’t such bad deal after all! I wonder how much I would have to pay someone to take my close to 7 year old Asus laptop that I paid $1200 for in late 2010?
My Dell has three and four finger swipe actions. Windows 10 defaults to three finger up or down (can’t remember) is show/hide desktop, left/right is switch active app
I still find the window management worse than Windows. The amount of faff I have to go through to get two Chrome tabs side-by-side on my Macbook Pro is ridiculous. But, other than that, it’s a good work laptop
My work 2016 macbook air is permanently bootcamped…but only as I live in MS Office suite and it still sucks on MacOS. But, I highly enjoyed my time on MacOS before I spat chips at Excel on MacOS and switched.
Would buy one in a heartbeat for personal use. In fact, I bought one for my old man a few years back. I am not exaggerating when I say the result of that has been a 90% reduction in IT support calls from my dad. Even then most support calls are usually related to some other piece of tech.
CPU speed wise, you’re … not having a party, though. Since you focused on browser speed, give me your http://browserbench.org/Speedometer/ results? In Chrome latest please.
Anything under 86 (current value of 2016 / Skylake cheapo macbook) is not… good.
Spaces, i guess is the term, works really well, but sometimes you just want things to be literally side-by-side, and OSX is kind of annoying in trying to do this.
Recently (1-2 years ago?) they added a feature where if you hold down the green maximize button you can place a window on one side of the screen, and the next open window you click will fill the other half. But on laptop sized screens you’ll be hard pressed to find this legible, especially on non-retina laptops.
But Spaces is pretty nifty if you’ve never used it before.
And, regardless, it doesn’t work easily with Chrome tabs, because when you drag them into separate windows, they go onto a new desktop. So you have to start with one tab, go out of full screen, open a new window, do the split screen thing, then enter the url you want on the second tab in the new window.
Relatedly, why won’t Alt-§ work with maximised Chrome windows? I shouldn’t have to use the desktop switcher just because it’s decided arbitrarily to create a entirely new desktop for my window.
