Seconding this. My company issued me a MacBook and I was really surprised by how well the touchpad worked, and how smoothly gestures work with it. For as much hate as Apple gets, a lot really Just Werks™. Windows and KDE (Wayland) (I haven’t tested other DEs) are certainly improving, but they’re still nowhere near as smooth as what MacOS has had for a pretty long time now.
The crazy thing is that I’ve hackintoshed a ThinkPad T430 and T480, both with full gesture support (but no force touch, though to be fair I don’t use that anyway). In both cases, using their touchpads on MacOS was much better than on Windows or KDE. Though some touchpads aren’t that great to begin with (like, the one on the T430 is pretty small), it’s crazy how much of a difference good software can make to how they feel to use.
“Apple” the company gets hate, b/c they deserve it, but Mac OSX is fantastic - they really put a ton of effort into it, though iOS is a piece of crap - e.g. now they are trying to extort the users to pay money to send files b/t their desktop computer vs. phone, which is just not okay imho. Mac OSX was from an older era, when Steve Jobs was running the company, and people would have legit left Macs (or not switched to it) if it had not been “solid” like it was. Since then, the new era is not to provide “products” but rather “services”.
Oddly enough, with the advent of Windows 7 (so many years ago now), it is fucking Microsoft that has been innovating their software - they are such a terrible company (as too is Apple, and Google, etc.), but they at least were pushing forward, more than Mac OSX, as the Apple corporation switched to put nearly all of their development efforts into iOS, and Music, and TV, and so on.
Apple ofc also has that hardware+software integration thing going on - monopolies really do have their advantages, as well as detractions too. You mentioned hackintoshing a Thinkpad, so I guess you are aware that often people will take a Mac and put Linux onto it as well, it’s wonderful that people have put in the efforts so that we have such possibilities:-).
The issue you described with the touchpad on the hackintosh sounds more like a particular driver issue, which gets deeper than I have any knowledge of so I’ll stop there:-). I will say tangentially that the Mac OSX has a shit-ton of cool features like font antialiasing, the Preview program is amazing, and I could go on and on but what usually gets lost on people is how Mac tended to have had things first, like everything has Bluetooth now, but Mac OSX had it long before Windoze did. I know nothing about Windows 10 or 11 though, except that they push to offer things as a service rather than product, and they show advertisements throughout:-( - those aspects alone turn me away from wanting to use it, even if the rest was somehow a better experience than Mac OSX (which I expect is NOT:-P).
Wow, a nightmare thought just struck me: if Apple enshittifies Mac OSX… the world will become a noticeably worse place, overall:-(. Fortunately someone will have it backed up and we can hack it (even if having to use older hardware), and there’s always Linux that while significantly behind - especially in drivers & UI/UX concerns - is better than it has ever been.
what usually gets lost on people is how Mac tended to have had things first, like everything has Bluetooth now, but Mac OSX had it long before Windoze did
That’s just not true - in fact, Apple is well-known for repeatedly releasing ‘new’ products/features that already existed elsewhere, but acting like they invented it. That goes all the way back to the original Macintosh.
Or, to use your example, everything I can find says MacOS added Bluetooth support in 2004, while Windows XP was patched to support Bluetooth in 2002.
MacOS is good software, but let’s not pretend Apple hasn’t built their entire empire based on pinching other people’s ideas and marketing them better.
People hate on apple coming out with features later than other companies but then they usually blow the competition out of the water in terms of ux. It’s not marketing them better, it’s implementing better.
It’s like valve helping develop proton vs making another nvidia shield or windows handheld.
I probably misremembered some stuff but also stated it too broadly - it was a lot more “mainstream” in Macs than in Windows, in part b/c you could purchase a low-end Windows machine, whereas all Macs start off at a baseline minimum that is fairly high.
Also, Apple put BSD Unix into the very core of their Macs years before Microsoft started poking their noses around the subject.
The end result was a machine that “just worked”, right out of the box, which was pretty nice.
It’s not just the software either. I really like the feel of the Apple trackpad. It’s glass instead of plastic like a lot of others. And the haptic feedback feels exactly like what a click would feel like
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Seconding this. My company issued me a MacBook and I was really surprised by how well the touchpad worked, and how smoothly gestures work with it. For as much hate as Apple gets, a lot really Just Werks™. Windows and KDE (Wayland) (I haven’t tested other DEs) are certainly improving, but they’re still nowhere near as smooth as what MacOS has had for a pretty long time now.
The crazy thing is that I’ve hackintoshed a ThinkPad T430 and T480, both with full gesture support (but no force touch, though to be fair I don’t use that anyway). In both cases, using their touchpads on MacOS was much better than on Windows or KDE. Though some touchpads aren’t that great to begin with (like, the one on the T430 is pretty small), it’s crazy how much of a difference good software can make to how they feel to use.
“Apple” the company gets hate, b/c they deserve it, but Mac OSX is fantastic - they really put a ton of effort into it, though iOS is a piece of crap - e.g. now they are trying to extort the users to pay money to send files b/t their desktop computer vs. phone, which is just not okay imho. Mac OSX was from an older era, when Steve Jobs was running the company, and people would have legit left Macs (or not switched to it) if it had not been “solid” like it was. Since then, the new era is not to provide “products” but rather “services”.
Oddly enough, with the advent of Windows 7 (so many years ago now), it is fucking Microsoft that has been innovating their software - they are such a terrible company (as too is Apple, and Google, etc.), but they at least were pushing forward, more than Mac OSX, as the Apple corporation switched to put nearly all of their development efforts into iOS, and Music, and TV, and so on.
Apple ofc also has that hardware+software integration thing going on - monopolies really do have their advantages, as well as detractions too. You mentioned hackintoshing a Thinkpad, so I guess you are aware that often people will take a Mac and put Linux onto it as well, it’s wonderful that people have put in the efforts so that we have such possibilities:-).
The issue you described with the touchpad on the hackintosh sounds more like a particular driver issue, which gets deeper than I have any knowledge of so I’ll stop there:-). I will say tangentially that the Mac OSX has a shit-ton of cool features like font antialiasing, the Preview program is amazing, and I could go on and on but what usually gets lost on people is how Mac tended to have had things first, like everything has Bluetooth now, but Mac OSX had it long before Windoze did. I know nothing about Windows 10 or 11 though, except that they push to offer things as a service rather than product, and they show advertisements throughout:-( - those aspects alone turn me away from wanting to use it, even if the rest was somehow a better experience than Mac OSX (which I expect is NOT:-P).
Wow, a nightmare thought just struck me: if Apple enshittifies Mac OSX… the world will become a noticeably worse place, overall:-(. Fortunately someone will have it backed up and we can hack it (even if having to use older hardware), and there’s always Linux that while significantly behind - especially in drivers & UI/UX concerns - is better than it has ever been.
That’s just not true - in fact, Apple is well-known for repeatedly releasing ‘new’ products/features that already existed elsewhere, but acting like they invented it. That goes all the way back to the original Macintosh.
Or, to use your example, everything I can find says MacOS added Bluetooth support in 2004, while Windows XP was patched to support Bluetooth in 2002.
MacOS is good software, but let’s not pretend Apple hasn’t built their entire empire based on pinching other people’s ideas and marketing them better.
People hate on apple coming out with features later than other companies but then they usually blow the competition out of the water in terms of ux. It’s not marketing them better, it’s implementing better.
It’s like valve helping develop proton vs making another nvidia shield or windows handheld.
I probably misremembered some stuff but also stated it too broadly - it was a lot more “mainstream” in Macs than in Windows, in part b/c you could purchase a low-end Windows machine, whereas all Macs start off at a baseline minimum that is fairly high.
Also, Apple put BSD Unix into the very core of their Macs years before Microsoft started poking their noses around the subject.
The end result was a machine that “just worked”, right out of the box, which was pretty nice.
It’s not just the software either. I really like the feel of the Apple trackpad. It’s glass instead of plastic like a lot of others. And the haptic feedback feels exactly like what a click would feel like
I’ve used a few trackpads on PC laptops that were almost as good as on a MacBook, but yeah, most of them kind of suck.