Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is “switching to iPhone”, a similar thing happens with “just use a Mac”. Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?
Most of the time, using an iPhone, Mac, etc., does not “just work”. Maybe the UI is simply not very usable (not just Liquid Glass, see MacOS’s terrible implementation of a settings app, iOS not having an option to combine the quick settings and notifications), third-party devices (headphones, chargers, tablets, etc.) simply do not work well (no, “get the iDevice” is not helpful!), iOS having the most ass file management that may as well not exist, all the different bugs poking around everywhere (through my own experiences with iOS* and my friend’s with MacOS), etc. “Give more money to Apple to fix it” is not good advice and does not help to solve anything.
Why is it that, when Apple has inherently worse hardware, everybody seems to put up with it? On their Macs, you have 60 Hz LCD displays on a $1000+ laptop, no good ports selection unless you spend thousands more, ridiculously priced memory and storage upgrades that would be a death sentence to any other company, very shallow key travel that feels terrible to type on compared to other options, etc. As for their iPads, you have similarly not so great displays on a relatively high end tablet unless you spend thousands on a tablet with an uber-fancy M5 chip (why would anyone need that???), a keyboard case that is so expensive despite feeling like a cheap membrane keyboard you got on Aliexpress and being so top-heavy, etc. Who in their right mind would purchase a $550 set of headphones made of ridiculously heavy metal, with uncomfortable cushions, terrible battery life, mid ANC, and several year old innards?
How has Apple manipulated so many people with their marketing? I don’t really see anything quite like it in other product segments. What is the secret apple sauce?
*note that I currently run an Android phone, but I have my issues with them too that I won’t get into. My particular device is very bloated and incredibly annoying to work with sometimes, but it’s what I’ve got. On my laptop I happily run Linux, where the device simply listens to me which is a nice change of pace
edit: Actually, no, I think something similar occurs with Nintendo (in video games) and Disney (for films)
edit 2: A lot of people have added their own thoughts, and I think it boils down to these:
- consistency (this is the main one): aside from a few odd products, Apple has mostly had a good reputation for build quality and having all their products be at least good enough, sometimes excellent, in part due to their limited product selection. If you look at other laptops and phones, they are quite hit or miss for the most part
- some form of elitism: some people (not all, but definitely some) want to show off that they are better than others, and Apple having expensive products is a brand name that lots of people recognise. They think that if you see the metal chassis and the half-eaten apple, it means that person has a lot of money and influence! And since they want to show others they have lots of money and influence, they too want Apple bits (similar to the variety of other “luxury” brands)
- that one exclusive feature that you associate Apple with: think features like Airdrop or how the AirPods seamlessly switch between Apple devices, it’s one of those that traps people in the closed ecosystem
- the failures of their competitors: Windows is shooting each of their own toes, plastering all their bloat and CoPilot bits everywhere. In part due to Windows, it’s difficult to make a competitive laptop, particularly in the budget segment, since Windows 11 makes everything run worse. MacOS is the only other option besides Windows for most people if they want a laptop, this is speaking as a Linux user, as there aren’t many laptops that ship with a Linux distro OOTB. Macbooks don’t have very good repairability and have horribly expensive memory upgrades, but a lot of people don’t really care about that
- they are good enough: There might be better options available for the price, maybe there’s a 120 Hz laptop with OLED, maybe you can get better camera hardware, maybe you can have a lighter chassis, you can get an equivalent for a far lower price, etc., but a lot of people don’t want to wade through all the garbage and are okay with spending more for something they are familiar with. Apple’s products aren’t always the best, but they are never the worst, and for a lot of people, that’s enough
It may be hard to believe, but some people actually buy apple products because they like them.
They dont like them in any meaningful way, they are shiny, they are used to them and everyone they know has one. That is the size of it.
To re-phrase for the cheap seats people are willing to pay for familiarity and ease of use within a contained and overwatched environment. This demographic will make the transition to AI guardianship with barely a blip on the resistance scale. I am not being derogatory, it is probably the smart move.
Personally, I don’t get why the solution to many of the issues people experience with Apple devices is to buy another one.
Yes, this is only a subset of people and the Internet shows you the worst of them, but I still find it a little hard to believe somebody reasonably suggests to purchases another device that costs so much!
Personally, I don’t get why the solution to many of the issues people experience with Apple devices is to buy another one.
I’m not really familiar with this. My wife uses a macbook. She’s had it for 6 years and I can’t recall any real issues with it.
Just from my personal experiences when I was using an iPhone several years ago, as well as whatI have seen on the Internet
As far as laptops go, exactly which company is producing a competitive product to Macs? Like at this point it’s a no brainer, get a cheap Mac for an average user and they get better hardware and don’t have to deal with how bad Windows has become. I’ve even switched grandma over to one after her PC died.
I run Linux for my own stuff but given a choice between a mac or windows for work I’ll take the Mac every time. Even the cheapest Mac beats the typical business laptops. Good screen. Touchpad that doesn’t utterly suck. Better performance.
Sounds like you’re not a system admin. Sounds like you’re comparing the shittiest possible PCs to Macs.
I like the part where I bought a $350 PC laptop for Christmas and it does everything and saved me hundreds of dollars.
<Shittiest possible PCs. Yeah, that’s what corps distribute to their employees. They suck but we gotta use them because only their hardware is allowed on the network.
$350 pc laptops suck. I’ve never used one that price worth a damn.
As someone who migrated from android pixel to an all in Apple ecosystem I’ll provide my context. As a software developer for cloud most of my software runs in Linux, so having a platform that mirrors it pretty closely is a plus, in addition to being a sturdy and performant coding machine, development on a windows laptop has always been far clunkier and unstable comparatively to my Mac experience. From there a person recommended I get an Apple TV to get away from my Samsung smart TV integrations that were dog shit slow, this was a vast improvement plus I could mirror my laptop to the tv easily.
From there I decided I wanted to do some pen drawing on a tablet, and I looked into things like remarkable etc but my experience with android tablets with pens was lackluster so I went with a iPad Pro with the pencil and it has been a great experience, the fact that it can seamlessly be controlled by the MacBook was pretty stunning the first time I accidentally discovered that feature. Follow that up with being able to plug in the iPad and have it be a 2nd display and it has been a great companion to the MacBook.
I got my wife a iPad Air as well and she loved it so when it came time to upgrade our phones I looked at my history with android, of my last 4 android pixel devices all 4 of them had to be recalled either for a bricked scenario from a patch or battery expansion. I decided I might as well give the iPhone a try, this also allowed my wife to have a universal computing experience as she could open tabs on her phone then migrate to the tablet seamlessly.
When I got the iPhones I decided to get their AirPod pros as well since I heard they can pretty easily transition(without button press) between devices easily, and that it has hearing aid grade audio enhancement(I am old and have bad hearing in certain scenarios. The user tailored enhanced hearing was game changing in certain environments and the transitioning between devices has been in all but 1 scenario a great experience(for some reason my iPhone 16 and the AirPods don’t always get along, requiring a phone restart to get them to operate).
Android auto vs CarPlay is personal preference but I find CarPlay to be a bit more sleek and easier to navigate and more performant.
So the trick at least for me has been how seamlessly it all fits together, the hardware quality and polish(aside from the iPhone/airpod thing that does annoy me pretty hard) and the reduction in overhead I have. Instead of dealing with windows 11 bloat and spyware, android device quality and occasional patching problems, a TV that runs like dogshit because it’s using old phone hardware to drive the experience, I can instead focus on what I want to do with the hardware, it just makes me more productive, less admin work, more time to create.
Time will tell I suppose if I feel the same way when my current stack ages out of the support window, but overall I prefer the low maintenance I encounter with this setup so I can focus my efforts on my docker swarm and other facets of my homelab.
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“How has capitalism tricked the masses into vapid consumerism?”
As someone who prefers linux but is relegated to Windows, my wife is strictly an Apple person and I have to say I’m impressed with them.
She doesn’t use a laptop a lot but she has some upcoming certifications to renew and so she brought out her 2015 macbook pro. It was outdated and had no recent OS updates available. However after a simple manual installation of a few year newer OS it runs just fine. At one point we considered buying her a new laptop this time. While looking at new laptops I told her we could get a cheaper Windows one that would be ok for a few years or another, slightly more expensive macbook that would last another 10. I don’t think we’ll need to buy a new one though as her 2015 seems ok to run at least until 2028 and that’s only because of available OS upgrades.
Our kids were also using her iPad 2 when they were younger from 2011 and it ran fine until 2022 and again, no hardware issues, just old performance and lack of support.
But probably the biggest thing is when I put a pihole on my network. Almost EVERY device be it google, Samsung, Windows, LG, smartphones, printers, TVs, etc etc is CONSTANTLY pinging outside your network. To the tune of thousands of blocked attempts per day per device. Yet Apple products are constantly at the bottom of the blocked attempts list, closer to about 100 per device per day.
I used to be an Apple hater, but switched ~4 years ago for some of the reasons you’ve given here.
I handed my 2012 fat macbook pro down to my mom. Still kicking with 16 gigs of RAM since I upgraded it when I still had it. I myself got it for like a hundred or two hundred euros. It’s running on a newer MacOS than it officially supports with opencore. Yes, Linux will support devices even longer, but how many laptops have this kind of hardware longevity? Mostly just Thinkpads, but not all generations of those either. And SOME generations of Elitebooks, but not most of them. Bit of a survivorship bias on this one though, some of the 2010-2012 15" models had different forms of graphics chip failure, mine was 13".
Android landscape is changing, but when I switched to iOS, you could get, for the same price, 3 years of Android updates for a flagship phone vs ~5-7 for iOS. But if you have an iPhone 8, you still got security updates in May despite not having had a new major version since 2022. That model is turning 9 this year.
Android runs on non-Google devices too, so Google needs to make money off those by doing something other than selling hardware. iOS only runs on Apple devices, they’ve already made their money off each device. Not saying they’re absolute privacy champions, but they have a lot more to lose in terms of reputation if they were doing extensive spying on you 24/7.
This all without even getting into the Apple Silicon chips. M1 when I had it was ridiculously fast and power efficient already.
People love to feel superior and having blue text bubbles does that. Not green text bubbles (yuck) but blue text bubbles. It was that easy! /s
So use Textra and change it.
My text bubbles are blue yet I’m on Android.
I think you need to understand how powerful Apple’s marketing is, especially in the US. People just like a system that is simple and just works. Their use cases are limited. They don’t want to spend time to figure out which distro to install or which instance to join, they just want to start their browser and go on twitter.
I will disagree with your statement on iPad displays. The iPad has been one of the only viable tablet out there for graphic artists. The pencil is great, the color accuracy and consistency between Apple devices is excellent, the device is just functional for that type of workflow. Now if only it were repairable and not subject to planned obsolescence…
I run hybrid zoom sessions for people and rely solely on macbooks to run them. I have never had issues with them, and am very happy to stay on their OS (tahoe now).
They give free macs to public schools, so when those kids get to college or join the adult world, they can only use MacOS.
Same reason Google gives away Chromebooks and Microsoft furnishes computer labs and gave free computer classes to teachers and corporations. Plain market capture. If you convince people that your product is what computers are, then they will prefer it due to familiarity and aversion to change.
They work quite hard to make it all work together well, and push to make their devices status symbols. Apple is the premium product everyone wants, and all that.
So the hardware may be lacking, but Apple tries to make up for it in making the OS work nicely, and tie in relatively nicely with any other Apple devices you have.
By comparison, the other options aren’t nearly as seamless. I’d need a lot more fiddling to send my keyboard and mouse inputs to an android tablet, or share the clipboard, for example, compared to a Mac being able to just push the mouse and keyboard to an iPad with no extra work.
The file management remains atrocious over USB (it’s basically the iTunes file transfer interface), on both Mac and Windows, but they’ve basically tried to paper over it with airdrop and an iDevice file manager.
Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is “switching to iPhone”, a similar thing happens with “just use a Mac”. Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?
At least from my personal perspective, I’ve never heard nor seen people recommending someone buy a different device to supplement something they’re currently using.
With the exception of things like debugging (for some bewildering reason, if your Mac’s software breaks, you need another Mac to repair the software), it tends to be fairly self-contained.
The closest thing seems to be more that if you’re on a device that Apple hasn’t released the full set of features on, some stuff just doesn’t work properly, because it expects the full feature set, and seemingly ends up trying to annoy you into replacing it that way.
On my old iPad Mini 2, for example, you couldn’t actually close the slide-out panel, or expand an app there, since Apple didn’t let them use the split view, and you needed that to expand the window. The closest you could get is making the app crash when in the slide-out, and then it would open normally, or a lot of finagling by swapping it out with a different app, and then running the original app you wanted to.
My current one has a different issue where some apps have Apple Intelligence specific features that I cannot turn off, because the setting I need to change is put away under Apple Intelligence’s settings, and that’s not available on my device, so the settings are also inaccessible.
Apple isn’t a brand. It’s a cult. They don’t have to compete with actual market - they just need to build stuff that justifies cultists.
How it started? From Steve Jobs. After he departured from Apple it went into slow death until he went back and make iPod and then iPhone. Cult of personality. It works in US for some reason. Same with Elon Musk, really. And with Trump, and bunch of other public figures.
Apple actually learned their lesson, and after Jobs was gone, they targeted their marketing to shift public worship from him to the brand.
Their products are shit gimmicky pretty looking overpriced garbage that have few redeeming qualities (like iPhone camera which is really good actually) but otherwise they don’t compete with the general market.
like iPhone camera which is really good actually
All modern phones (even the cheap ones nowadays) produce excellent photos, so iPhones aren’t isolated in this respect. And many equivalently priced options have far superior camera hardware (and arguably software processing too, their colours usually look more pleasing than the iPhones).
produce excellent photos
Photos, yes, I agree 100% but videos is a bit different thing. I know professionals who use iPhone for making short vids for TikTok and instagram specifically because video quality is good, even with subpar light setup.
That is something I’ve heard of, and I think it’s because Apple has more resources to focus on more professional video codecs and such (which others may not bother with due to it being good enough for most people already)
Samsungs produce shit photos because the firmware is appalling.
This just sounds like you don’t understand why people like apple products and are tying to cope with it. Read the other replies in this thread if you’re interested in expanding your understanding.
Apple is a cult.
They are successful because they nailed device management and corporate IT loves it.
There is a lot of angry people, despising everything that even touched apple and let me tell you there is a lot of things I hate. For example you need second mac to reinstall os after breaking partitions no usb stick for recovery for you sucker. That said there is a lot of neat features that just work like apple tv box screen-sharing or using iphone as keyboard instead of dealing with arrow typing on remote, or when someone calls I can just respond on my laptop. To sum it up yes you can find cheaper device yes you can also find more performant device. What you won’t find is this walled garden of things that just work together. And for those angry people it’s okay that some people have different preferences than you have.
