I don't buy Macs anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#21

Post by cosmic_cheese » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:22 AM UTC

jondwillis wrote: post #14

I'll never get those five minutes back. Author is too busy dunking on low-T hipsters (no need to call me names) and imagined pin-dicked Apple employees while blathering on about skill issues. Woah, walled-garden company doesn't have a convenient way for you to exit? >NoteStore.sqlite

Yeah, was gonna comment on the Notes format myself. It uses SQLite (as most Apple apps do) and individual note data is saved as gzipped binary blobs. Not the most arcane storage scheme out there by a long shot.

There’s ways to automate note exporting with AppleScript, too. The Notes app surfaces notes content in both plain text and HTML forms. Here’s an AppleScript and Automator workflow I found that does exactly that: https://github.com/johansan/AppleNotesExport

Not that export couldn’t be better, but post author clearly didn’t go far in researching any of this. All assumption no problem solving.

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#22

Post by koakuma-chan » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:26 AM UTC

eqvinox wrote: post #3

koakuma-chan wrote: post #2

I skimmed through the post, and it seems all his complaints predate Apple Silicon.

what has that got to do with anything in TFA?

Apple Silicon outweighs "company cultural values blah blah blah" ?

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#23

Post by koakuma-chan » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:28 AM UTC

smitty1e wrote: post #20

herval wrote: post #10

What makes someone write so many words just to tell the world they don’t like a brand?

Years of pent-up frustration that were spleen-dumped into the post, as far as I can tell.

Could also be the bias that longer text is better.

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#24

Post by Esophagus4 » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:29 AM UTC

throw310822 wrote: post #16

Reminds me of the day I found an iPod mini on the ground, brought it home, had to download an entire damn software to put songs into it, and when I accessed it as a storage I discovered all the song names had become UUIDs. Fucking LOL.

Have you considered that it was actually a whole bunch of records whose song names HAPPENED to be UUIDs??

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#25

Post by makeitdouble » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:29 AM UTC

That rant was long.

My take after having been in the Apple ecosystem for a while: it's perfect if you can throw money at any issues.

The author's issue with notes not exporting goes away if he had multiple Mac's and never cared to move away from the walled garden.

People pissed about gaming on the mac are IMHO in the same boat, the real answer is usually "buy a console or gaming PC", or in other words "throw money at it".

People wanting cellular on the mac solved the issue with money (either an iPhone or portable WiFi). People wanting the iPad to do more solved it with money (permanent server connection and/or Mac screen sharing).

For people who don't have money to throw around, that ecosystem will just be pain at all turns IMHO. (It might be well worth it, but you need to be willing to commit that money in the first place)

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#26

Post by Esophagus4 » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:37 AM UTC

Awful rant of an article, but I will say… Apple had a really frustrating period for laptops for a while. It was so bad that, while I loved OSX, I bought a different laptop.

- the early butterfly keyboards were fragile, difficult to type with, and stuff got stuck in them

- USB-C only transition made me have to use adapters everywhere

- the touch bar (and software escape key) was atrocious

- the glass screens were too thin and could break easily

They’ve fixed most of those issues since, but man, for a few years they were awful machines.

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#27

Post by throw310822 » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 1:39 AM UTC

Esophagus4 wrote: post #24

throw310822 wrote: post #16

Reminds me of the day I found an iPod mini on the ground, brought it home, had to download an entire damn software to put songs into it, and when I accessed it as a storage I discovered all the song names had become UUIDs. Fucking LOL.

Have you considered that it was actually a whole bunch of records whose song names HAPPENED to be UUIDs??

Damn! Now that I think of it, it was indeed an album by my favourite band, b93cf126-32b5-4806-90bd-7abdea4bee34!

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#28

Post by poemxo » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 2:20 AM UTC

Why didn't he just use dtrace to find his notes, or make a bunch of changes to a note and do a find command, leading him to the sqlite file he needed?

Idk it seems to me like I just read something written by someone who considers himself a computer expert because he built a computer, but doesn't actually know anything.

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#29

Post by adamredwoods » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 2:28 AM UTC

herval wrote: post #10

What makes someone write so many words just to tell the world they don’t like a brand?

Computers are so integrated into our daily lives, OS, hardware are worthy of any critique. I also feel those choices are getting smaller.

Re: I don't buy Macs anymore

#30

Post by D13Fd » Sat, Aug 23, 2025, 3:06 AM UTC

This article is a pretty lame rant.

I'm no engineer, but I know I need to back up my Mac, just like every other PC. I run Arq and back it up to cloud storage, and I also have a sync program set up to back up my most critical files to secondary locations.

Yes, Notes is proprietary. But why is that a surprise? It basically says it on the tin. That's exactly why I have never used it. I used Notational Velocity, nvAlt, some others, and ultimately Obsidian. All my notes are text files that have followed me for 1.5 decades, through multiple Macs.

As he tells it, Apple support put in the effort to figure out how to restore his Apple notes on his old computer, including walking him through an OS upgrade to do it. And that's supposed to be a bad thing? It sounds like a pretty amazing support experience, honestly.

He says he can't export Notes individually. I don't use Notes at all. But I popped open Apple's Script Editor just now, pulled up the Notes dictionary, and I see AppleScript commands for opening notes and for saving them in particular formats. You can also read the "HTML content of each note." It should be pretty simple to set something up to pull each note and save them in plain text format as he originally thought. I bet this is better than most notetaking apps with proprietary formats.

This whole article basically boils down to "I didn't back up my stuff, Apple bent over backwards to help me recover it, but I don't like the Notes PDF export format or the sharp edges on the hardware so I think Macs suck."