My Criticisms of Macs

Since starting my current job I have been using a Macbook (15 inch 2018 model) as my daily work machine. Previously I made use of an Ubuntu Dell XPS in my last job and before that a Windows 7 Dell Latitude (I think) which I also often used a Linux VM on.

This post is written after spending quite a few months using my Macbook and represents my thoughts and opinions on it from a software developer’s standpoint, specifically from someone who does (and has done) a lot of Data Engineering tasks, and Java/JVM focussed development on both Windows and Linux machines.

I have quite a few criticisms of the Macbook and it’s Operating System in general. Do bear in mind that these are my own opinions and based on what I like and what works for me, I am sure many many developers can get by and be very productive within the Mac and Apple ecosystem and have worked with several in my career who absolute adore their Macbooks and desktop Macs as development machines. Also some of these these criticisms are quite nitpicky and approach the category of “first world problems” in some of their pettiness. I am overall happy to continue using my Mac.

So without further preamble here are some of my criticisms and things I find annoying about using a Macbook for work:

• Different shortcut keys to both Linux and Microsoft, even for the same software and common shortcuts. One that is quite annoying to me is the use of the Command instead of the Control for many shortcuts.
• Non UK ISO keyboard layout. Mainly it is the ", @, | and a few other keys in odd places that irks me. Or the weird paragraph symbol I had never seen on a keyboard before using a Mac. The Macbook I use also lacks a real escape key and uses the touch bar instead, this is minor though as I don’t really have a problem with the touch bar and the key is in a logic place.
• My Macbook sometimes sounds like it is taking off when doing tasks that to my eyes should not be all that intensive. This isn’t necessarily an issue with the Mac itself though as I have used other laptops in the past (e.g. the Dell XPS) that have definitely had similar issues, which may well be due to form factor and built in fans getting clogged up.
• The App Store. In general it’s a mess, full of overpriced useless apps that make it difficult to find any useful applications.
• Any “extra” functionality to customize my experience seems to always cost a bit more than I’d personally be willing to pay.
  I understand and to an extent agree with the philosophy of paying for good tools to do a good job but some of these seem like incredibly basic features that the OS itself should include, or simple third party tools that should at most cost a couple of £’s not pushing £20!
• Finder is one of the worst file managers I have ever used.
  The fact that the delete key will not send a file to the trash is insane, return does not open a file but instead allows you to rename it, it’s not simple to show hidden files, backspace does not take you back up the file tree, I can’t copy a path to a file, easily open a terminal in a folder etc.
• Native zip file support is awful. There is no obvious way to view the contents of a compressed file without extracting it, this is built in functionality in Windows!
• The equivalent of ALT-TAB, CMD-TAB, does not work between windows, but rather applications and can be annoying when dealing with multiple windows for the same application spread across different workspaces.
• Lack of full sized USB ports. I appreciate the newer USB-C ports, they are an awesome design but in general very few peripherals are using this standard right now.
• Lack of other useful ports. Luckily my Macbook still has a 3.5mm headphone jack but it lacks Ethernet, DisplayPort or HDMI ports requiring Mac friendly adapters.
• Siri. Unsure why I’d want this on my laptop let alone touch bar, thankfully you can remove it from the latter.
• The extra cost for a lot of the peripherals, less of an issue for me as it is a work machine, but I did have to fork out ~£25 for a USB adapter for working from home so I could plug in my normal PC equipment.
  Generally though Mac hardware is a tad on the pricey side, >£100 for a touch pad, £80 for a mouse that lacks useful buttons and can’t be used while being charged… The external keyboard too seems a tad expensive.
• Speaking of mice, for some reason lots of Mac software cannot work out how to handle mouse buttons 4 and 5 on my personal mouse; generally used for back and forward, especially annoying in Firefox.
• While I don’t hate it, I do not understand why the options for minimizing, closing and maximising are to the left instead of right, that is rather nitpicky though and a non-issue in the grand scheme of things.
  What I actually dislike is why I have to hold Option down to make me able to maximize but not full screen a window, it feels backwards.

That’s a longish list of, some admittedly petty, annoyances and criticisms. So here are a few things that I do like about the Macbook and Mac OS:

• It seems fairly stable. I have not seen it really crash very often, my Dell XPS had a habit of silently filling up all it’s memory and pretending to work while it slowly stopped responding.
• It has enough memory and CPU resources for basically any task I have needed it to do. Honestly though 16GB of RAM is a huge amount for most situations.
• The launcher/Spotlight Search is a great tool for running programs. It reminds me of the Linux program dmenu but is much more user friendly.
• The way you install software (outside of the app store), while slightly different to most other platforms is relatively easy to do and understand.
• Homebrew seems to be a great package manager, easy to use and understand.
• The touch bar is pretty neat, a good way to keep functionality on a limited sized keyboard, although I rarely use it.
• The touch pad and gestures on it are excellent! Probably one thing I absolutely love. I am still not the biggest fan of using 2 fingers for a “right click” functionality but it works. I still loath the Mac mouse however.
• Workspaces aren’t as great as alternatives I have used on Linux but they are good and a nice way of organising your work.
• A lot of terminal software is kept pretty up to date, this might be due to using Homebrew however, when using Ubuntu I always found that a lot of the available packages were pretty out of date.
• It’s kind of pretty, as an OS and laptop, I guess.
• The keyboard, peripheral and attached is pretty quiet, which is nice for an office setting, it isn’t the most comfy to type on for extending periods of time however and the layouts still drive me up the wall.
• Power over USB. As much as I dislike the lack of USB-A ports power over USB-C is a good innovation and makes for easy to use charging cables.
• The battery life is good, and general power profiles make sense.
• The way it handles monitors being unplugged and plugged back in is great, restoring workspaces etc. this is something that was always terrible on my Linux laptop.
• It has some excellent software, although I don’t really use anything Mac specific, I know people rave about Keynote etc.
• The screen and it’s colours are great, not something a less visual person like me can really appreciate but if you do a lot of photography or video editing it really helps.

And there it is; some of my likes and dislikes of the Macbook I have been using.
It may seem like I dislike working on it but it is definitely not the worst development experience I have had and is a lot nicer than trying to develop on some corporate Windows machines I have used in the past.
A lot of my criticisms probably stem from my habit of tinkering with Linux desktops over the last few years to get a customized experience and workflow going.

Originally when I was starting at my current job I was given the choice of what development machine I would like with Surface Pro being the Windows equivalent and there being no Linux option. And overall I am happy with the choice I made.