This is true, but funny thing is: it was also true before AI.

I was trying to come up with a response but you're right. It would be easy for Apple and Apple would get so much goodwill from the community in return.

They get more public goodwill from a single ad. The chronically online Linux-using engineer community is too small to matter.

Looking at: https://stats.asahilinux.org/ there is still a pretty large userbase who are so interested in it they go this route. I imagine that count would easily 10x if it would be officially supported. Those numbers are nothing to sneeze at.

I'm running asahi on my macbook. And never touch OSX. I wouldn't even had gotten it if asahi wasn't so well supported.

And let’s be honest, they still wouldn’t be satisfied. The goal post would move to something else. Why don’t my AirPods seamlessly handoff to my Linux MacBook?

I doubt that. The developer community is what made the MacBook predominant in every tech organization. Before that Macs were mostly popular in the creative sector.

Developers build many of the applications that make the platform desirable. Steve Ballmer at least seem to get that part. ;)

The developers for their platforms. Which, crucially, Linux developers are not.

Apple Macbooks support virtualization of Linux on MacOS.

That's a low bar. Microsoft does too, with a much better hypervisor.

Yes, Linux developers are officially supported by both Apple and Microsoft, with Microsoft developers being a major contributor to upstream Linux and WSL2 having grown into a capable Linux development environment.

CPU decoding/encoding for video means warm chassis + spinning fans. Fan noise is very annoying with video calls.

I'm a tech lead and pushing back against accidental complexity is basically my fulltime job.

I'm an Engineering Manager, and I think I have a similar role just applied to people processes rather than code. One nuance though - a lot of the time I suspect it's deliberate complexity designed to obfuscate how little people actually do.

Thats projection.

Well, maybe. It's projection, because I certainly don't make simple processes myself a lot of the time, but I do try to optimize them afterwards. I have a few decades of seeing people implement processes than I've had to use, and then had to simplify as I moved into more senior roles. I've had people push back quite forcefully when I've pointed out they do things like writing reports that no one reads or gathering data that teams ignore. People often fight for added complexity because their perception is that it's important, and that means they must be important because they're the one in control of it.

There is an element of projection because there is in most things people talk about; I'm speaking about this through my filters and biases after all. But it's grounded in a fair chunk of experience.

Maybe you are saying the same thing, but couldn't that be explained better by those people being afraid to be made obsolete? Or at least, afraid if having to retrain?

This isn't new. I've seen it for decades, including in situations where no one is at risk. I don't think it's often a fear thing.

Ofcourse this has been tried, the highest possible resolution with HiDPI is limited to what the article says.

Yes, BetterDisplay offers this functionality and it kind of works, with some drawbacks.

Scaling up before scaling down is a sensible approach, especially when you want to run at a slightly lower scaled resolution. It worked fine up to M3 Pro. So whatever you think of it, it's something that worked fine for many years and suddenly doesn't anymore on the newer MacBooks.

It doesn't. They take extreme use cases such as watching video until the battery depletes at maximum brightness where 90% of power consumption is the display. But in realistic use cases the fraction of power draw consumed by the display is much smaller when the CPU is actually doing things.

For whatever reason I keep catching my macbook on max brightness. Maybe not an unrealistic test.

Decent package manager, brew is awful compared to apt. Window snapping can only be done on Apple keyboards not on external keyboards. No Alt+Tab, Cmd+Tab is not the same. No window previews when hovering over dock, ridiculous animation speed when switching workspaces that can't be changed (and somehow Ctrl+1/2/3 is 2x faster than Ctrl+Left/Right? What is that all about). Needing third-party apps for basic things like: setting a custom resolution (BetterDisplay), setting scroll direction for mouse wheel independent of touchpad scroll direction. And the Settings app is super slow.

What is bad about brew? I have used it in the past and I found it fine. With apt I have less experience since I only used it when playing with a raspberry pi.

I find it generally slow and by default it gets in the way in a very annoying way. Without disabling the feature l, every single time I try to install something it also looks for updates so instead of installing a single package I end up upgrading many additional packages

> Decent package manager, brew is awful compared to apt.

Use Macports. Installs itself properly out of the way in /opt. Works with the Apple frameworks (eg Python), allows multiple versions of software to be installed in parallel (using port select).

> Window snapping can only be done on Apple keyboards not on external keyboards.

Yes, you need some free 3rd party apps for affordances that should be built in. Hardly a deal breaker.

Rectangle allows you to set the hotkeys for window snapping and sizing for example.

As for scroll directions, yes, it's different to Windows, but it's the same on the Mac and iPhone. Didn't take very long to adjust.

Agreed that the new Settings app is a PITA and obviously inherited from iOS and sucks, but how often are you accessing Settings?

Macports is alive and well and works great.

Nix darwin + package manager with aerospace and sketchybar make it almost the same as my desktop pc. Could that be an alternative?