"I swear, I wish I didn't love macOS so much (or wasn't so heavily invested in it), or I'd happily ditch it for a really powerful thermally cooled desktop and use that as my machine."
I was you at this time about two years ago. Exact same thing. Fed up with Apple hardware bullshit, and with their pricing. With Apple in general. I had a sick iMac (as sick as an iMac can be, I mean). Loved and was invested in OSX. But something tipped the scales. Can't remember what specifically, but I said "fuck it" and put the machine on Craigslist. Got a buyer immediately, and lost very little money on a three year old machine. Took the cash, plus a little more, and built a PC. A liquid cooled PC. An egregious, so-ugly-it's-kinda-neat monster with tubes and a radiator and fans and the whole deal. I run Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu. Neither is perfect for me. Windows especially can be maddening. My personal pet peeve is the lack of powerful device search -- in OSX, I could use Spotlight or better yet Alfred to look inside PDFs, for example. SOL on that in W10.
But it was worth it. My AMD-powered PC smokes anything in my Zip code, I'm pretty sure, and it's more than enough for my work needs (and my work does actually put the thing through its paces.)
A Spotlight like feature is coming in the next update to Windows 10 I believe. Totally agree on PDFs though, Windows doesn’t even have a solution as decent as Preview on MacOS. The default for PDFs is internet explorer for gods sake.
And curious, do you dual boot Ubuntu, or do you use WSL? My biggest gripe with Windows is the insufferable terminal. But WSL fixes that, and WSL 2.0 is going to have full platform Docker support as well.
Now that Apple insists on proprietary chips, has horrible thermal throttling, got rid of the MagSafe charger, and regressed on keyboard experience, I can’t say I’ll buy another MacBook if my current one dies.
I didn't know about that upcoming feature. I'm really excited to hear that, so thanks. The PDF thing is a wild oversight, too, but I found SumatraPDF and am really impressed by its light weight and speed and bare-bones ethos. There's barely a UI but man can it handle 53 open PDFs at once.
I have both WSL and dual boot, but I dual boot way more. This is likely because I am a command line idiot, and never got fully fluent with navigating my computing life using one. It's high on my list of skills to master in life, because I know what a force multiplier it can be, but I haven't gotten around to it. I mostly use Linux to write, weirdly enough: from org mode to LaTeX to statistics coding, it's a smooth experience - again because it's pretty "just the basics" and does them well. I have no actual need for Linux - I'd be fine with just windows. I guess it's more aspirational on my part.
Apple's moves: yeah man, they're taking that walled garden shit to serious extremes. I know there's a logic to it that works for them, so I don't begrudge them their choices necessarily. But I did really like the company for a long time, so it's a bummer to see them the way they are now.
> My personal pet peeve is the lack of powerful device search -- in OSX, I could use Spotlight or better yet Alfred to look inside PDFs
X1 Search [0] is lightning-fast, results-as-you-type, and searches inside every file and in all of your email and attachments. Not just what's open in your mail client but also email archive files. I have email archives back to 2000, and the lookup is still instant.
X1 is actually one of the two things that had me switch back to Windows the two times I've gone all in on a switch to Mac. (Ironically back then the motivation was Apple's hardware was much better.)
Everything is insanely fast. Even though I have X1 Search and use that for content search (I commented on GP about that), I still use Everything for any search on filenames or directories because it opens instantly. I also love that typing slashes at the beginning or end of a phrase filters a search to a directory. It even supports Regex.
Oh yeah for sure, I found everything pretty quickly and it's definitely indispensable. I'd love if it did content search, but file search is great and fast and straightforward.
Same here, AMD Ryzen PC. Not liquid cooled, but it is a mini-itx cube which is neat.
I have a mid 2012 MB air that I still love. Screen isn't nearly as nice, but I use it over the MBP because the keyboard isn't like typing on cement and I can actually use it on my lap without feeling like its actively trying to burn my balls off. In all fairness though, I have a XPS 9560 and 9360 and both overheat and throttle like crazy and require throttle stop. Lone cowboy admin for a small company so I've got a pile of laptops.
> My personal pet peeve is the lack of powerful device search
I'm legitimately curious. I've used OS X a bit, but am primarily a windows/linux user.
In 20+ years of computer use, I've never wanted this facility. I actually take the option of removing the search indexing system from windows 7 (where you still could), and just used everything's filename search. On W10, I deliberately disable/break cortana/search so it doesn't run all the time.
Out of curiosity, what do you use a file-aware search facility for?
Great question. The answer may boil down to the way my memory works. I work in research, so I'm constantly reading and citing papers and studies for lit reviews, general understanding, making sure no one else has done the project I just thought up in the shower (usually they have), and mainly just staying at the crest of the wave in my field and subfields.
With the exception of the big famous names (famous for the 13 of us in our niche, anyway), I rarely remember those studies' authors, nor the titles of the papers most of the time - i.e. the data encoded in the filename. But I do remember certain phrases, numbers, and the like that they use in the body of the paper - in other words, the material that actually interests me. File content search for PDFs and other text allows me to enter one of these snippets and find the paper in question without having to spend minutes upon minutes scratching my head about "who was that lady at NYU ... or was it a guy at Berkeley"?
That's odd. I was just searching a directory of PDFs for a title and I was getting irritated that it was returning results from the file content. Are you sure this doesn't work for you? I am using the insiders build so that may be the difference. Also, it's Edge that windows uses for its default PDF reader and it's actually quite good. There are a few UX quirks, but it's very performant.
If you want to search inside a PDF file, install Adobe PDF Reader. Windows Index Search doesn't have a PDF filter by default, you need a filter for it.
Yeah that's a great point. I thought about it initially, but I got a little nervous (perhaps unjustifiably) about the Hackintosh universe being a little slapdash and then about Apple maybe issuing some under the radar OS update that bricks my machine. I'm catastrophizing, maybe, but I never pulled the trigger. That said, I never actually put in the 3-4hrs of reading I'd need to do, so I definitely wouldn't rule it out.
Do you have experience with doing the Hackintosh thing at all?
I did the Hackintosh thing for a friend on one of those 10” HP mini-laptop 5 years ago. It was delightful when it worked, however every macOS update (or OS-X back then) was a toothache—usually culminating in 2-7 hrs of googling/re-configuring etc. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the machine wasn’t this person’s main machine, or if I had waited longer before updating (so known procedures to make things work were available and not still being understood and developed by the community).
Might be a very different experience on a desktop, but definitely read up on the update experience and time-cost if you go this route.
I am currently in the middle of my own Hackintosh build on a fairly compatible laptop. If you are not prepared to blindly execute commands and run applications listed in a few different guides and then hope for the best, and you wish to grok what you're doing to your computer (so that you could, say, debug inevitable problems), I'm sorry to report that you are looking at many, many more than 3-4 hours of reading. Let me just say here that I have many, many years of experience in helpful fields (software, hardware, firmware, -nix), and I don't hesitate to say the process of building a Hackintosh is difficult and involved. That is, if you don't intend to buy specific compatible desktop hardware and then use specific software tools to do the install. For example I am installing on a laptop using the new bootloader OpenCore (versus the long default Clover) and I do not already have a Mac or Windows system handy, so I'm doing the install from Linux. This makes everything more complicated, but this is probably more similar to the "average" use case for most users than building a desktop Hackintosh using Clover.
That being said, the good thing is that the situation is improving: The documentation is being constantly updated and consolidated (which can be its own evil as you know, since there is frankly too much documentation out there, most of it outdated), the tools are getting easier to use and performing their functions in less hacky ways, and the community of Hackintosh builders is growing. But just be advised that the vast majority of the community of Hackintosh users really have no idea what they've done to their systems beyond being able to regurgitate the instructions they followed in whatever guide they used. And so most of the posts and replies on the forums and subreddit will not be helpful for solving any of the inevitable issues you'll run into. Probably 95% of thread replies are other users flailing around with their own similar-sounding problems, suggesting essentially random switches to flip in the configuration files (further complicated by completely new issues introduced between version updates, as the sibling comment mentions). This is problematic because in actuality, everyone's using completely different hardware and so none of the ubiquitous suggestions of "You need to enable this setting since it worked for me" are applicable. Successfully building a Hackintosh essentially comes down to loading the proper firmware settings and hardware drivers which just so happen to work for your particular set of devices. So just go into it with eyes wide open to the fact that this is a large community standing firmly on the shoulders of a very few giants, and be mindful that you can physically damage your machine if you take the wrong suggestion from a random forum user for a problem you're having. The most helpful external (non-Hackintosh) documentation I've often referred to during this process are the current UEFI and ACPI specifications, just to give you a heads up on something useful to have handy. Good luck!
This is really helpful, thank you. What you say puts some form and empirical evidence to my concerns about Hackintosh. I guess my gut had it right this time, which is unusual. So you can brick your fancy new homemade, warranty-less PC!
Anyway maybe one day I'll do it for fun on a crappy laptop I get off Craigslist. Sounds like this pays off most when it's a low-risk effort.
That's probably for the best. I bought a laptop with a known-compatible processor, and confidence in my past experience in hardware that I'm not too worried about frying my machine. For someone technical who knows in advance about possible hardware damage, I'd just say that while damage is possible, this is mostly a danger for when you'll be "patching" the ACPI configuration files that define to OSX how it should interface with your processor. So if you aren't careful, you could be telling OSX to send voltage down a line that shouldn't have voltage on the line. I mean you're not gonna smell your mistake, but you won't be using that CPU ever again. And of course as you know, essentially pounding a square peg into a round hole like you are doing when trying to fit Apple's device drivers to your particular hardware, the possibility for damage is there, too. That all being said, if you enjoy a technical challenge and learning a lot about how OSX works, it's a great opportunity to work up a sweat, with relatively little risk to your hardware if you approach the problem the right way, prepared to grok what the guides and documentation is really saying.
I was you at this time about two years ago. Exact same thing. Fed up with Apple hardware bullshit, and with their pricing. With Apple in general. I had a sick iMac (as sick as an iMac can be, I mean). Loved and was invested in OSX. But something tipped the scales. Can't remember what specifically, but I said "fuck it" and put the machine on Craigslist. Got a buyer immediately, and lost very little money on a three year old machine. Took the cash, plus a little more, and built a PC. A liquid cooled PC. An egregious, so-ugly-it's-kinda-neat monster with tubes and a radiator and fans and the whole deal. I run Windows 10 Pro and Ubuntu. Neither is perfect for me. Windows especially can be maddening. My personal pet peeve is the lack of powerful device search -- in OSX, I could use Spotlight or better yet Alfred to look inside PDFs, for example. SOL on that in W10.
But it was worth it. My AMD-powered PC smokes anything in my Zip code, I'm pretty sure, and it's more than enough for my work needs (and my work does actually put the thing through its paces.)
I miss OSX, but not enough to go back.