M5 MacBook Pro

Don't get me wrong, I don't have an issue with linking. I think that's the correct solution.

In fact, it's kinda the only solution unless you can push info upstream, and you shouldn't assume you have those privileges or even know their data structure. But that doesn't matter because what the user cares about is how the information is displayed.

It is primarily a display issue. No deletions needed

The critical issue is I, the user, can't identify if these two contacts are in the same address book or not. The only way I can find this out is to guess and check. I have to guess the address book and then search that name, then repeat. That's not a reasonable solution nor does it scale. It's trivially solvable too. Just tell the user what address book a contact belongs to!

That's what leads to the confusion. All the program is telling me is that there are two contacts with the same name, nickname, phone number, and birthday. But the contacts differed on email and notes. The UI feedback tells me "Apple doesn't know how to do a trivial database query" not "Apple doesn't want to destructively merge these contacts because they are in different address books." That is actually not an obvious thing and I chased multiple other issues first. This is especially bad because in my calendar I had 3 entries for this person's birthday and 3 contacts. 2 were linked to my iCloud address book and 1 to Google (by ctrl clicking on the date, but maybe (in hindsight) that's not actually accurate). I somehow got it down to two, which resulted in 4 birthdays on my calendar! That actually created a false flag because now the icons showed as of 1 was from google and now 3 from iCloud, with all 3 no longer linking to a contact. The feedback the programs are giving me is "Apple can't merge tables", right? Or at least that's a reasonable interpretation.

I think theres a relatively simple solution to this. 1) indicate on the contact card which address book the contact belongs to. 2) "Find duplicates" queries across address books. Present the option "link contacts" instead of "merge". It's obviously reasonable that a user would want this as you have that capability for a reason. I honestly think "merge" could be "link" in most cases, because depending on the data structure those will be equivalent (you reference a node. That node has children pointing to the different tables). I agree, you shouldn't delete data, but there's also likely no reason to (yes delete if you have duplicate pointers pointing to the same object unless these pointers are aliases)

The same idea applies to calendar events. I missed a ton of events when I first switched to an iPhone because I'll look at my calendar and see 3 copies of "Columbus Day" and 1 "Indigenous People's Day" (Apple does both!) and not what I had scheduled for 10am. The only solution I have is to disable the holiday tables from my Google calendar and outlook. Effectively that's "deleting" data. This looks like a fine solution but those calendars aren't identical. As a user I want the union. I want deduplication. Because who wants redundant information? It's clearly not something the user is intending (at least in this case). That's going to be true for things like birthdays too (which I'd be happy to import). Apple doesn't even distinguish that as a separate table for my Google calendar so I'm stuck with dupes.

Effectively it is a display issue. As a user that's what's critical to me because that's what makes the program useful. As a programmer, yeah, I care about details but my tech illiterate parents don't.

Tldr: who said anything about deleting data?

> Sounds more like a you problem...

I don't. I'm constantly shifting between my Linux desktop and a Mac for work. I also picked up a personal MBP with as much RAM as Apple allowed (still far overpriced and limited options) about a year and a half ago. While I don't regret it, it's still not my first choice.

If there's "endless options for local dev on a Mac" then I don't know how to describe the flexibility that a decent laptop running Linux gives you, comparatively. Honestly I think the Mac only excels in one area still today and that is: the breath of their paid for software library. The polish of Mac used to be the draw, but OS X has degraded over the years as Apple shifts to unify IOS and OS X. And don't get me started on the garbage that iCloud is that Apple continues to force feed harder and harder having, clearly, taken cues from the Windows team in Redmond.

I'm really hopeful we start to see more ARM options in non-Mac laptop formats soon. Because, while trivial, it is nice to be able to run small models for a variety of reasons.

It is interesting though that I see a "huge share of devs" using a Mac to write code targeting Linux environments when they could actually simplify their development environment by ditching Mac. To each their own.

It’s a TextEdit vs Pages thing. Try Ghostty, Kitty or iTerm2.

It was different for me. I tried to move from Windows to Linux multiple times, but my Dell just refused to run it reliably no matter what. After fidling with multiple distros I finally bit the bullet and went for a mac. I cant be more happier to have a Linux experience without the Linux pains.

Note that there certainly are quirks around arm64, however, coming from windows, i am no stranger to have to deal with such issues so they bother me less.

The best thing is, that i can confidently put mac into my backpack without worries of it performing a suicide due to not-fully-sleeping (common windowns issue)

> please turn off the RGB lights

This but unironically ;-)