Ask HN: Has anyone moved away from Mac?

Have you spent any time looking at OpenCore Legacy? I briefly was using it on my 2014 13" MBP to install whatever the latest version-1 was. It worked well for a bit but I ran into an issue after an update. I bailed on it but learned later that it was a relatively easy fix. Might give some new feature support to you.

I really think this era of MBPs was the best. I'm kind of shocked how well my 2014 still works.

I've got a 2010 iMac that my kid uses running Sonoma (macOS 14) via OpenCore Legacy and it works great for him. I'm currently waiting on a wireless card to give him Bluetooth 4 so he can use Airdrop.

It's funny: there was a time when Apple understood that it could attract customers by making its devices the first choice for developers. And it did a good job, with a real Unix underneath that wasn't overly hidden, with a lot of open source support, and just generally being an ok citizen in the developer world.

That strategy, which I think ran from early OSX through until mid-2010's? worked, and you'd see the results, with a sea of glowing Apple logos, even at Linux conferences.

I think they've changed since then. It feels now like developers are not a priority, even as they've re-added some power-user features in recent years.

As for longevity, I think my current laptop speaks for itself. It's now 11 years old, and going strong. I've carried it around the world, dropped it numerous times, and it's been the best laptop I've every owned. They do artificially force an end-of-life, usually at around 7 years old, for their operating system. I don't really have a problem with that: I appreciate that it's difficult to continue to support old hardware in new releases, and I think that timeframe is reasonable. I'd prefer that it was explicitly stated, and I'd prefer it was longer, but ... it's not bad, really.

Over the years I have had many devices: desktop PCs, Unix workstations, Linux workstations, and laptops from 6" to 17". In the early 2000s I bought a 12" Powerbook, which was my first Mac -- the motivation was to get seamless Microsoft Office document support on a Unix system, and it did a fine job of that. Eventually I spilled water on it, and replaced it with a 13" unibody MacBook, which I later upgraded to the current 15" MacBook Pro.

I currently have a work-supplied dual Xeon 56 core, 192GB RAM, 8TB SSD monster Dell with 2x27" screens on my desk which is used for my day job compiling a large proprietary C++ application. That's the right kind of machine for that job, and I wouldn't do it on a laptop by choice.

But for my personal stuff, while I'd previously set up my laptops as a secondary device to be used when travelling, when I got the 2014 MBP, I deliberately upgraded to the 15" screen, maxed out the CPU, and got a big SSD so I could make it my primary device. And that's been a model I have liked a lot.

I don't travel anywhere near as much these days, and could probably revert to a desktop instead and just access that remotely via Tailscale when I travel, but ... I like having everything in the device in my hand.

But it's a good point: I should probably reconsider.

> I don't want to have to deal with issues on this laptop. If I pull a system update, I want it to install without a problem, automatically, overnight, and not require hours of debugging and reverting and then finding a fix a week later.

This is why I never made the jump to Linux. Around 2017-2019 Apple's Laptops had gotten really bad. I was considering moving to Linux, but I've had several situations where I've run normal Ubunutu updates from Canonical and found myself unable to boot. I don't know if this is common, I don't think I was doing anything unusual (stock Ubuntu).

Yup

I'd used until 2020, and moved away to Windows laptop.

The key reason of moving is that, Apple suddenly moved Korean/English change to another position. In Korea, the language changing key is positioned at the right of space. And in 2017, Apple suddenly erased the language changing key, and let user to guie "Caps Lock" button instead. And the original "Caps Lock" key, it is working only when pressing the "Caps Lock" key over 2 seconds.

I thought that Apple did a terror to Korean users. However, I just kept using the Macbook just by customizing the language change key to others by the 3rd p zarty key mapping program. ' By the way, Apple did more terrible thing at 2020. They suddenly removed "\" (Korean dollar symbol called "won"), and moved it to use the "`" key. The previous "`" key has been disabled when typing Korean. So when writing markdown content, whenever I need codeblock, it makes me crazy.

Furthermore, Mac has critical bug on language changing delay problem. If I press the language change button and keep going typing, the language change is adjusted after the following keys. This is called language chaning delay. Korean users are requesting t fix the bug for 20 years, but never be resolved.

  - expected: 안녕하세요 여러분 (pressed 한영전환) Hello everyone
  - actual; 안녕하세요 여러분 (pressed languge change key) ㅗ디ㅣㅐ ㄷㅍㄷ교one