I’ll write down some of my impressions regarding my recent decision to transition completely to the Apple ecosystem.

First of all, I had three options: Windows, Linux and Mac. All three come with serious issues – woke infestation, American spying, corporate spying, ideology and so on. With Windows, it seems that the quality of the product had seriously degraded since they fired their QA staff to cut costs, and they transitioned from being financed by the user, to being semi-free to the user and being financed by ads, which makes the present-day Windows as infested with all kinds of unwanted stuff they are installing without user permission, as a Xiaomi phone. That’s absolutely unacceptable. Also, since their QA is borderline non-existent, they keep pushing updates and patches and fixes for bad patches and so on, and something seems to be perpetually downloading and installing in the background, and if you don’t use your computer for any length of time, it will be absolutely bogged down by a seemingly endless stream of updates that will take most of the day to clear. Also, as they require an increasingly more closed down hardware platform in order to run, the former advantage of PC as an open platform on which you can install anything is, for the most part, lost, and a present-day PC is barely any more open than a Mac. It’s still not as bad, but it’s getting close. The advantages of Windows are that everything runs on them, as they are for the most intents and purposes the standard OS. It’s the default platform for gaming, business applications and so on. Also, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is great, and for all intents and purposes Windows and Linux are blended to such a degree that they feel like a single system, and you can run both sets of applications on the same system without rebooting into another OS, or running a virtual machine. In some senses, Windows is better than it ever was, but in others it’s worse than ever.

The GNU-Linux project is so infested with ideology, from wokeism to communism, that it seems completely bogged down and will never overcome those issues. The basic concept of trying to avoid money as a system of rewarding utility always re-appears there as a stumbling block, and since it is very sensitive to the issue of a very limited number of developers maintaining critical components, it is also very sensitive to ideological corruption and bribery, as much as the large corporations are sensitive to government pressure and legal constraints within America. Basically, Linux has its own set of issues; they are just slightly different than those of Windows and Mac.

A Mac looks like an increasingly closed-down nightmare, where the user is increasingly losing influence, but on the other hand, on a Mac I have homebrew and macports projects that allow me to install more-less the same GNU package that I have on Linux. For all intents and purposes, I can bypass Apple’s nonsense, install whatever I want from the open source library and do my thing. It sounds closed down, but in reality the greatest restriction I feel is that my favourite games are not ported to Mac. On the other hand, it’s a refreshing alternative to the kilowatt arms race on the PC platform, where AMD, Intel and Nvidia are competing to produce the most power-hungry, hot machine they possibly can, to the point where cooling solutions for the hardware became ridiculous in the recent years. The problem with Apple is that when they decide not to produce the kind of hardware that you need, you are stuck, and I had that situation when they refused to make bigger iPhones so I got a Samsung Note, and returned to Apple once they came to their senses, but at the moment their iPhones have everything I need, their iPads have everything I need, their laptops are excellent and meet all of my needs, and their desktop lineup for the first time contains something I actually wanted to buy, instead of the all-in-one iMacs and the overpriced Mac Pro monstrosities. Also, since I have an Apple phone, tablet, laptop and earphones, having an Apple desktop as well allows me to integrate all of those things slightly better; the key word is “slightly” – for instance, I can switch the AirPods to the desktop with a click, and switch them back to the iPhone easily, where on Windows desktop this would require pairing them to the desktop, which would then “steal” them from the phone every time I log in – I tried that, thank you very much. The main advantage of a desktop Mac, however, is the absence of the Windows update nightmare. Also, the hardware ports are all modern and fast, unlike a PC where you get one or two “fast” ports, but everything else is a decade-old legacy. Having four Thunderbolt ports and all USB ports at the latest speed standard available is refreshing and liberating, because the external drives I plug in will work as fast as the internal one. Advantages of external NVMe storage are not to be underestimated, and I really missed having Thunderbolt ports on my PC, which is in all other respects a winged beast of a machine.

The Mac Studio plugged into my peripherals seamlessly; I just connected my 43” LG 4k display to the Thunderbolt port and it worked perfectly; I connected my Logitech webcam, mouse and keyboard and they worked perfectly. I connected the powered USB 3 hub to one of its USB A ports and this gave me a place to connect all kinds of dongles and charging cables that I use; all works perfectly. I also connected the Samsung T7 2TB SSD drive while I wait for the 4TB NVMe drive that I have on order, so that I can work with my photos in Lightroom, and everything works great. It’s not that my PC was some ancient legacy shitbox, so you’ll hear no raving about how fast a Mac is in comparison; it feels the same. The Windows keyboard layout on a Mac feels confusing so I took the Apple keyboard from the drawer and I’m using that now, just to see what it’s like, but for all intents and purposes the experience is remarkably similar to my Windows desktop, only without stability issues and Windows updates, which means mission accomplished, I guess, because that’s what I wanted to do.

Am I more susceptible to Apple’s whims now? I guess so. However, if I look at things from the practical perspective of wanting things to just work for me and not get in my way, Apple seems to allow me to just pay for things and get functionality, while others substitute money with either ads or ideology, both of which I detest. On Apple, I feel like the user and not like the product that is sold to the advertisers, and as for the money, my PC hardware was not actually cheap. In fact, it’s all in the same price range as Apple stuff, only designed with different priorities. The aluminium Studio machine doesn’t really fit into the matte-black aesthetic of the rest of the setup, but I guess I’ll live. The black (or, in Apple terms, space grey) “magic” keyboard and touchpad, on the other hand, fit great.

I tried Linux on my PC, yes. When I use the Nvidia driver, the screen doesn’t turn on after waking from sleep. I can solve it by using the Nouveau driver, but then the Ethernet port stops working. In short, I’m too old for this shit. When I was a kid I would have found it a challenge to get everything working, but now I just find it annoying; it gets in my way and doesn’t help me do the things I want to do any better, faster or easier, so it’s a hard pass.