> Ask any sysadmin who had a fleet of Macbooks during this update cycle: it was a nightmare and a half.
That’s not saying much, everything is always terrible and it was all better under Lion/Snow Leopard/Tiger/OS 8. The 4 computers I had to update did it just fine.
> Brew and Macports both suck. If you use Linux on a daily basis, then you're well familiar with what a good package manager looks like: apt and Pacman are both good examples.
Indeed. From my experience either work great (I use CentOS and OpenSuse daily, alongside macOS). The only bits of software I’ve ever needed which weren’t on Macports were quantum chemistry codes, which I wanted to compile myself anyway to configure them properly and avoid MPI issues. At some point I had to compile GCC myself to track the development branch, but I haven’t had to do that in quite a while now. So yeah, your points are valid, but they still do their job, and you don’t have to rely on them for OS updates, so they cannot compromise stability.
> The ball is in Apple's court then. If they want to brag about being a real Unix system, the least they can do is ship modern Unix tools with their OS. Ironically, MacOS is the least compatible Unix system around.
They haven’t bragged about it in a decade. Besides, if you know UNIX, you realise that this kind of shenanigans is just life, and that there is quite a bit of variance in the specific implementation of user land software. Your problem is not that it is a sub-par UNIX, it’s that it isn’t Linux (which isn’t UNIX). The BSDs also lack most of the GNU tools by default, and so did most other UNIXes when they were still around.
> I mean, the M1 Macbook Air is sitting in my desk as we speak.
That’s fine. I didn’t accuse you of lying, and you are entitled to your preferences. I just pointed out that your arguments were not great, and indeed often heard from people who never really used Macs.
> My guff is well founded, I think: as the most valuable company in the world, Apple has an obligation to provide at least some level of modularity in their ecosystem.
This might be your problem. Whatever their market cap, they don’t really have an obligation to align with your opinions. I understand that you’d like it, but what kind of moral imperative would there be?
> Otherwise, the precedent they set will continue to influence every market we can conceive, until our concept of "ownership" is poisoned to mean a subscription service.
How is this related to their business policy? I strongly dislike their foray into services, but other than that they sell devices, not subscriptions. Your devices are yours, nobody is going to come and take them.
> It's driven by greed, and makes me sick. It always comes at the cost of the user, and the declining greatness of MacOS is a perfect example of how Apple's hunger for money is poisoning their product line.
Right, so you have an ideological problem and that’s why you sound like that. Well, if I can recommend anything, it would be to keep using Thinkpads, they are good devices and Linux is great as well. That way you can completely ignore whatever happens on the Apple side and be happy.