Been there and jumped ship. The last “MacBook” I owned was the 2018 MacBook Air of the high end variety. The thing gave me a serious rash on my arms and they keyboardd keeepppttt ddooiinngg thhiiiss. So it was returned after two weeks. I flirted with the Mac mini as a desktop this year with an iPad Pro as a portable computer. Both are gone now as well. This is the first time I’ve not had an apple computer since 2004. The next upgrade cycle gouging and the ARM uncertainty buried it for me finally.
My conclusions are that the entire brand lacks substance and the productivity gains are marketing. The prices are quite frankly ridiculous especially here in the UK. The cloud offering is buggy, unreliable and inferior to just about everyone else. The things are an administrative and tooling nightmare. The software is mostly inferior and suffers from terribly discoverability problems and it’s really difficult to drive from a keyboard. I think a lot of it is running a hype train. Look at iOS 14. I can’t actually think of a single new feature or function that actually made any difference to me. But oh so much marketing.
When I sold my Apple kit recently I replaced it with a custom build Ryzen 3700X, 64Gb RAM, 1Tb NVMe SSD, GeForce 1660, 27” 4K display, Cherry MX keyboard. The iPad was replaced with a Lenovo T495s. I had change left after selling the Apple stuff. If I wanted to buy that sort of power in the Apple ecosystem I’d be down an additional £2000. I use Office 365 personal for cloud stuff. It just works.
Edit: when I look back I don’t look back fondly at my previous MacBooks. They were universally trouble in some way or another from thermal issues to fragility and unreliability. What was I thinking.
My conclusions are that the entire brand lacks substance and the productivity gains are marketing. The prices are quite frankly ridiculous especially here in the UK. The cloud offering is buggy, unreliable and inferior to just about everyone else. The things are an administrative and tooling nightmare. The software is mostly inferior and suffers from terribly discoverability problems and it’s really difficult to drive from a keyboard. I think a lot of it is running a hype train. Look at iOS 14. I can’t actually think of a single new feature or function that actually made any difference to me. But oh so much marketing.
When I sold my Apple kit recently I replaced it with a custom build Ryzen 3700X, 64Gb RAM, 1Tb NVMe SSD, GeForce 1660, 27” 4K display, Cherry MX keyboard. The iPad was replaced with a Lenovo T495s. I had change left after selling the Apple stuff. If I wanted to buy that sort of power in the Apple ecosystem I’d be down an additional £2000. I use Office 365 personal for cloud stuff. It just works.
Edit: when I look back I don’t look back fondly at my previous MacBooks. They were universally trouble in some way or another from thermal issues to fragility and unreliability. What was I thinking.