Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

You know the thing I worry about next: how are apps going to inevitably bloat in inefficiency and claw back the improvements in CPU?

I just got one. I’m blown away by the speed as well. Chrome runs insanely fast! Alas, it’s not developer ready yet. Brew is a mess. Docker doesn’t work. PyCharm is WIP although can use x86 version. I was skeptical of the hype but this little laptop has made me realize how slow everything else is.

Unfortunately, while the hardware has accelerated far beyond expectations, the software - specifically MacOS BigSur is a major step backward. So many fucking animations. Everything feels fluid like operating in molasses. The UI changes seem to be shoe horned into a desktop that doesn’t need giant white space for fat fingers. Menu bars are twice as tall taking up precious space. Top bar was already crammed with a lot of icons. Now, they’ve made them sparsely spaced by adding padding between the icons. Everything is baby-like with rounded corners and without borders. Segmentation UI elements are no more. I want to ask Apple’s UI team: WHY!? What is currently wrong with macOS Catalina UI? Until you can satisfactorily answer that, there shouldn’t be any change. Stop changing the UI like you’re working at Hermès. It’s not fashion. If the reason is to unify everything, all screen sizes, then you’re sacrificing all three. Perhaps making it easy to develop apps for all 3 platforms is a plus, but as a user, this all feels like a regression. I’ve lost hope in modern UI engineering. It’s not engineering anymore.

I want macOS that has a UI of Windows 95. That would be totally insane on Apple Silicon.

At the risk of being that (Linux) guy --

What is gained here if we're just still applying faster cycles to Apple-esque wasteful (and perhaps harmful, as we're apparently learning re: their telemetry) software?

If people really dig their Apple stuff, great. But I think its worth thinking about the likelihood that a "slower" computer running Linux could probably serve the actual user better in terms of "getting stuff done." Moreover, I think we're pretty close to "beauty" parity here as well. Apple's advantage now is probably mostly the networked devices, i.e. unity between phone and pc messages, etc.

That makes sense and is to be expected. A faster hardware does take away some of the incentive. As the old adage goes - "Necessity is the mother of invention"

I found the macOS desktop much more responsive than GNOME which feels like a beast. Now I use MATE which is nice and simple but it’s no where near as nice as macOS.