crApple

I’ve come to own a bunch of Apple hardware. It looks good. It kind of works. But it has taken me a lot of time to come around to using it, and even that is for the most part just because I’ve already bought it. In this article, I’ll go over my lists of numerous reasons why it all sucks, and a few why it might not be total rubbish after all.

Remember that Apple’s primary goal is extracting money.

Since originally writing this, my stance has become considerably less radical, but pain points remain. I circumvent what I can.

Users

• The most insufferable aspect is the hordes of people trying to invalidate your needs when you mention any of this.

Hardware

MacBook Pro 14" (2021)

I’ll start with some of the main complaints of Louis Rossmann, who is a qualified repair technician for these devices, and knows very well what goes wrong with them:

• The display flex cable is fragile, and/because it is exposed to dirt.

• The machines aren’t liquid-resistant at all, and liquid damage is very likely to short the CPU to high-voltage power rails. Doing something about this design issue would harm Apple’s sales, so they won’t.

• Once the SSD wears out, or otherwise decides to die, you’re plainly screwed.

My personal issues with the laptop are these:

• The metal body is fairly sharp in places, such as around vents. It hurts to handle if you’re not particularly careful.

• The thermal ergonomics are horrible:

  • When the ambient temperature is low, the metal body acts like a heatsink, and is way too fucking cold to the touch, until you naturally warm up the machine.

  • When under load, the keyboard can get almost too hot to touch—​this is also extremely uncomfortable.

• No hibernate-after-sleep option (…​standby…​ in pmset), so if you forget to turn it off, your battery is completely dead in a week. You can set it to hibernate always, which introduces avoidable delays and SSD wear.

• While the display is amongst the best ones you could find in a laptop, it has rather poor angles, getting a blue tint near the edges. This distracts me.

• The M series chips + software cause some external monitors to flicker like crazy.

• The headphone jack is only for headphones. If you connect it to an amplifier, it is likely to carry a ton of computer noise, to the point of being useless.

• More of a software issue: the mouse cursor can hide behind the notch.

What I like

• The display has high brightness, high resolution, great uniformity, and a wide gamut (Apple uses Display P3). Despite being MiniLED, I don’t really observe haloing.

• The speakers sound really good, even though it’s all software trickery.

• The keyboard is pretty good, which can’t be said about many other laptops.

Magic Mouse

This device is generally a disaster:

• Again, the edges are too sharp. Very unergonomic.

• Dragging fingers over a glass surface is unpleasant. The design relies on you creating a film of skin oil, or perhaps having completely dry skin. The mouse gets dirty.

• It requires you to hold it in a very particular way, not laying your palm on it, or scrolling doesn’t work as it should—​there will be no scroll inertia.

• When it turns on, it doesn’t connect automatically. You have to click it. This is very cryptic behaviour, and akin to shooting a gun without aiming.

• No Force Touch.

• Let’s not forget that you cannot use it while it is charging.

What I like

• Horizontally scrolling through the timeline in DaVinci Resolve.

iPhone 15 Pro (2023)

I’ve obtained one for experimental purposes, and for a long time it stayed in storage, because:

• Battery life is nothing to write home about.

• There is neither a headphone jack, nor a microSD card slot.

• It is unergonomically shaped, needlessly fragile, and heavy.

• The camera bump is oddly positioned and ridiculously large, making it unwieldy.

I am comparing to a phone that came out 8 years earlier, LG Nexus 5X, which I would decidedly prefer if it only had longer stand-by time on Wi-Fi. By the way, phones aren’t getting all that larger, they just got cancer in the form of oversized camera bumps (yet virtually all phones still make only low-quality photos):

At least outside forces finally made Apple adopt USB C, and even Samsung AKG headphones work fine. These are not competitive advantages.

The prison walled garden very much bothers me, and I’d much rather go with either something like the Pixel series with Lineage OS or Graphene OS, or Samsung Galaxy Ultra, which has a stylus and DeX.

What I like

• The speakers sound really good, presumably using the same trickery as with MacBooks.

Software

Apple software follows three themes that make me want to do something violent upon usage:

• Everything animates, and you can’t turn most of it off. It is extremely distracting, and keeps wasting my time for absolutely no benefit. The most you can do is turn on "Reduce Motion", which merely makes you not get vertigo and barf all over your prized possession.

• It acts without your consent, such as automatically uploading your personal files to iCloud. Apple now has a copy of my contacts list on their servers which I cannot delete. At minimum it’s a dark UI pattern.

• It intentionally tries to trick you into installing software updates.

• If you don’t like how they’ve designed it for you, you can generally go fuck yourself.

That said, Calendar.app and Reminders.app are great and hard to find replacements for.

macOS

• Finder understands neither SFTP nor MTP. The Enter key is for renaming, not opening. You cannot skip the trash bin when deleting files. When you select multiple files and enter Quick Look, the order is reversed.

• Samsung AKG USB C headphones only randomly start working a few minutes after plugging them in. I’ve also repeatedly seen the kernel panic during CoreML inference.

• It seems generally harder to get decent graphical software than on Linux, for example to get SFTP or MTP—​what you find often looks very eccentric, as if it was made in the era of Windows 98. Many open source applications refuse successful porting.

• To transfer photos from an iPhone without using the cloud or Photos.app, you need to use Image Capture (wired transfer only), which is unnecessarily convoluted.

• It is impossible to set memory limits on a (sub)process, the system rather keeps swapping like crazy and wearing the SSD. There is no OOM killer at all, the most it can do is panic.

• The disk encryption password is forced to be the same as user passwords.

• The window manager is nearly unusable with simple tasks, very basic otherwise, and it may not be effectively replaced.

• Applications can activate without any window open, which gets extremely confusing.

• Setting system-wide environment variables is limited.

• Cocoa has a particularly convoluted design, and SwiftUI is bad.

What I like

• It is technically based on BSD UNIX, making it somewhat familiar to Linux users.

  Yet, the filesystem is normally case-insensitive, and I invite you to try out what this does:

  $ touch /tmp/test:file
  $ open /tmp

• Quartz is a cool technology.

• The global menu is nice. If only it was tied to the concept of windows rather than applications—​that would create less confusion.

• Shortcat can exist. It needs Cocoa apps to work, but those are the majority.

iOS

• The touch controls are annoying, inconsistent, and difficult to use. I need to repeat many actions. I’ve never had that problem before.

• Devices may not be used at all without an Apple account. Which needs a phone number assigned.

• There is no real sideloading, and Apple actively sabotaged EU’s regulations aiming to fix it, because it would mean less money for them.

• Lens distortion is not corrected in photos. There is no way to get rid of it at all, as far as I can tell. Not even Adobe DNG Converter has profiles to correct it.

• You can’t get an alternative browser engine (it’s theoretically possible in some countries, but practically no one has succeeded in making one; Reynard is experimental), and the mobile WebKit has many issues.

• Syncthing (Synctrain) cannot work satisfactorily, due to restrictions on how often applications can run in the background.