I got my dad a Mac about 10 years ago, and never got into the experience. I mean I got it for him, used a couple of days to tell him where was everything, delivered and then came back to my trusted thinkpad with i3.
About a year and a half I got a macbook from my employer even as a replacement from a T480 which was awful because of thermal throttling. After a couple of months, I got the m1 macbook air as my personal laptop. I guess the experience with the software I commonly use got better, but I feel like the biggest reason is that the experience with other laptops just became worse.
Yeah… I mean I love the “don’t have to think about anything” experience of all Apple products. That’s the reason why I use their stuff.
But at least in the last couple of years before the M1, the number of things that were just plain annoying… it really made me look for an alternative. And really… there isn’t one. Windows is so annoying to use and even the Linux fanatics I work with manage to run into trouble like once a month. And yeah it’s fixable trouble. But I really don’t want to deal with that shit. I want a useful trackpad, a useable browser and a usable mail program. I want my laptop to reliably suspend and wake up. I want, if there has to be a kernel crash, that I get all my windows back in the state I left it. That really doesn’t sound like too much. And yet it is.
And the worst part: Apple knows it. There is now quite a number of subpar experiences (looking at you Apple Music App) that they can just get away with.
This is my perspective as well. Apple products are basically out of the box usable for me (short of a couple of helper apps on MacOS) and frankly just do not crash or cause me any downtime.
But…I am admittedly well past my “OS tinkering” days. I finally realized how much unproductive time I spent trying to make whatever OS I was using “productive” and visually “correct” and realized it wasn’t net positive. So I just decided the default options was good enough, short of my couple of must have helper apps (Rectangle and Hiddenbar)
About a year and a half I got a macbook from my employer even as a replacement from a T480 which was awful because of thermal throttling. After a couple of months, I got the m1 macbook air as my personal laptop. I guess the experience with the software I commonly use got better, but I feel like the biggest reason is that the experience with other laptops just became worse.