Apple needs a Snow Sequoia

Also while Apples software quality has definitely diminished over the years, Windows in the same period has utterly CRATERED. Like I get along fine with 11 for my gaming PC but with every single update one feature or another becomes notably broken.

I have some hope that Framework and AMD can fix some of those issues. Would love to try out their new desktop (because it's a simpler, more tightly integrated thing) and replace my Mac mini -- then wait for Linux power management to improve.

As a former Mac user, I'm really happy with my System76 linux laptops. The only tradeoff is the terrible built-in speakers. My Lemur is lighter and has better battery life than my Macbook Air and has been bulletproof despite my ill treatment. Each of my Macs, however, have had various hardware failures or the famous keyboard recall on the horrible touchbar Macbook Pro. I also prefer matte screens to glossy, so that's a win for me, but ymmv.

This really is exactly how I feel. There are too many tradeoffs to switch to non-Apple hardware at this point. I'd love to run Linux/BSD full-time, as many of the apps that I frequently use on my Mac are FOSS (e.g., R, PyCharm, darktable, etc.) I've been a Mac user since 2002, and Mac OS X served as my gateway to the Linux/BSD world (that, and a short-lived use of RH 6.2 on an old Dell laptop). IMO, macOS really does need a Tiger/Snow Leopard-esque release, but I'm not sure the vast majority of macOS users would even appreciate such a release.

Not quite what you're after but if you want a fanless option that runs full linux and doesn't use much battery, the new argon 40 CM5 laptop that's being built looks like it could be viable as long as you'd be happy with that much of a drop in performance and a few pi based niggles (No USB C video, only one pcie lane for the SSD, etc.)

https://liliputing.com/argon40-is-making-a-raspberry-pi-cm5-...

Your loss. I haven't been able to tolerate the MacOS experience since Catalina, running GNOME with a Magic Trackpad has felt head-and-shoulders better for the past 3 years at least. Apple Silicon is neat but was never an option for native development in my workflows anyways. The software matters more to me, and MacOS has been sliding down the subscription slopware slope for years now.

I am perfectly happy to use last-gen hardware from Ebay if it runs an OS that isn't begging me to pay for subscriptions and "developer fees" annually. My dignity as a human is well worth it.

The newer XPS 13 comes with snapdragon x elite now (Qualcomm's answer to Apple silicon). Curious if anybody here runs Linux on one of those

The reason that keeps me on Windows, is that you left out of your list gaming and 3D graphics on laptops.

Metal isn't really on pair with Vulkan and DirectX in terms of relevance for graphics programming, the M chips aren't up to NVidia ecosystem, SYCL, the two major compute APIs for any kind of relevant GPGPU workloads, and thus don't really matter.

And gaming, well, even though all major engines support Metal, there is a reason DirectX porting kit is now a thing.

So why pay more for a lesser experience, and then there is the whole issue macOS doesn't have native support for containers, like Windows does (their own ones), and WSL is better integrated and easier to use than Virtualization Framework.

I think most of this is just downstream of the Mac being eclipsed by the iPhone in terms of Apple’s revenue. The Mac just isn’t critical to Apple’s business like it was in 2009 when Snow Leopard came out. They would have started development on SL in 2008, when the iPhone was still a fairly niche product and there wasn’t even an App Store.

Now, ios gets the executive attention and it will generally get the best developers assigned to it, and the Mac has to live with the scraps.

> I recently bought a ThinkPad to use besides my MacBook.

I'm on the same boat here. Something is driving me away from my MacBook M1(Pro? Don't even know). I have a gut feeling that it's macOS but can't really put a finger on it yet.

Bought a heavily used ThinkPad T480s (from 2018) and replaced almost every replaceable part of it, including the screen. Being able to replace many parts easily is a nice touch since I am using MacBooks since 2007 exclusively. Guess that's why I somehow overdid it here. Slammed Pop!_OS 22.04 on it and I'm very pleased with the result. The first Linux desktop I actually enjoy since trying SuSE 5-something. Pain points are teams (running in browser), bad audio quality with AirPods when using the microphone and cpu speed and heat. I guess one has to stop using Apple silicon in laptops to realize how amazing these processors are.

> 1Password tried SwiftUI for their Mac app

1Password had a beautiful native Mac app that works to this day. Even assuming SwiftUI is actually bad, why did they have to migrate at all? What was wrong with the existing app?

I'm not disagreeing with the opinions on Apple software quality, but I think the 1Password case is more down to their taking of VC money and having to give (JS) devs some busywork to rebuild something that worked perfectly well.

My favourite feature is when spotlight tells me that indexing is paused when I am searching for something.

You went through the effort to show some UI when something I am looking for may not be there because indexing is paused... but you didn't think to just unpause the indexing so that I can find it? I feel like I am being spit on, "Yeah, you not finding what you are looking for? I know, I'm not even trying"

I highly recommend using Alfred. I’ve been using it since before Spotlight came out, tried and then disabled Spotlight, and went back to Alfred. It’s extremely configurable but highly usable out of the box. Sort of like creating your own CLI shortcuts to open files, apps, copy things to the clipboard, etc.

https://www.alfredapp.com/

This KILLS me. It's so frustrating. APFS is supposed to be great at deduping files and such, but in practice it seems like it really sucks. It's bad at both saving a file to the desktop and dumping a million npm files into a directory.

Same here. Spotlight used to be my everything, i.e. I never use the dock I would always use spotlight to launch applications or navigate to folders. Now it is littered with internet garbage, takes seconds to even return any results, and the results are always useless.

Who the hell thought integrating internet search is a good idea - because "aösldkfjalsdkfjalsdkfj" just as everything else is a valid search result in Spotlight now showing me "Search for aölsdkfjöalsdfjasdlfkj in Firefox"...

You hold down command to see the path.

> There's no path shown with hits

I guess you do know the path is shown at the bottom of the window if you select the filename in the list of results?

I've yet to find a decent implementation of search-as-you-type anywhere, not just Spotlight. I have that same issue on Firefox, and with Windows Search, for example.

And it makes no sense whatsoever. If "foo" matches "foobar", so should "foob". I honestly don't know how the hell can they still f up such a simple piece of technology in 2025.

Finder search is just as bad. You can be viewing a directory full of JPEGs, all with the jpg extension.

Then you do a search for .jpg, and get NOTHING. But only sometimes. Other times it'll work.

See this same search issue in everything these days for what was a solved problem a decade ago, what “best practice” is causing this

Exactly.

People don't want animojis, and they don't want other trite new features that only seem to exist because Apple feels it needs to demo something new every year.

What they want is something that just works without annoyances, distractions, failures, or complications.

Give them that and they'll break down the doors trying to get their hands on it, because it's so far from how most tech works today.

I’ve had so many issues with it as well! To the absurd level where I could not search for settings in the Settings app… People all over the net have had all kinds of issues and there’s never been any help other than „oh go and reindex”.

The nice thing is that there are several apps which replace it and do a lot more at the same time. (Like LaunchBar, Raycast, Alfred)

This is exactly the problem. Hyper efficient (or at least trying to be) businesses have no room for craftsmanship. If you take the time to make quality software, you’ll be left behind by someone who doesn’t. Unfortunately the market doesn’t care, and therefore efficient businesses don’t either.

The only solution I know of is to have a business that’s small enough and controlled by internal forces (e.g. a founder who cares) to pay attention to craftsmanship.

You're implying that buggy software has no impact on the bottom line. I'm not so sure. Users weigh the availability of features against the quality of features. Getting bugs fixed is not necessarly the highest priority for users either. It's a trade-off.

Our use of Microsoft 365 is a pretty good example of that. I moved our company to Microsoft 365 because it had some features we wanted. Then I moved the company off Microsoft 365 because it turned out to be too buggy to be useful.

I realise that the actual users of software are not necessarily the same people making the purchasing decisions. But if productivity suffers and support costs rise then the consequences of choosing low quality software eventually filters through to purchasing decisions.

The problem is Agile. Not the way it was intended at some point, but the way it has become through Agile consultants and SAFe. Also the fact that it's become the default for any project and that Waterfall has become a bad word.

Companies abuse Agile so they don't have to plan or think about stuff anymore. In the past decade, I haven't worked in (or seen) a single team that had had more than 2 weeks of work prepared and designed. This leads to something build 4 weeks ago needing a massive refactor, because we only just realized we would be building something conflicting.

That refactor never happens though, because it takes too much time, so we just find a way to slap the new feature on top of the old one. That then leads to a spaghetti mess and every small change introduces a ton of (un)expected issues.

Sometimes I wish we could just think about stuff for a couple of months with a team of designers before actually starting a multi-year project.

Of course, this way of working is great when you don't know what you'll be building, in an innovative start-up that might pivot 8 times before finding product-market fit. But that's not what many of us in big corp and gov are doing, yet we're using the same process.

The underlying cause of this is online software updates. Knowing you can fix bugs any time removes the release date as _the_ deadline for fixing all egregious bugs. And so the backlog of bugs keeps growing.

Depends where you look. There's been a QA process in all the (agile, some very forward-thinking) teams I've worked with for the last decade. That QA might be being done by other devs, but it's always been there.

[flagged]

>which does not open in a new background tab when clicked with the MMB.

Which you notice because your page scrolls up wildly as you move to click on what should be the new tab

With regards to Google Flights, I seem to recall that there was some European Digital Markets Act occurrence. Google decided to comply with it in a malicious fashion.

It's hard to argue that systemd isn't a part of modern Linux robustness! It's not the only way it could have been done, but the more declarative model is absolutely better than shell script exit codes. Daemons don't have to worry about double-fork. User-level services are incredibly valuable.

Seconded about the desktops: currently loving KDE Plasma over here. Less sure about systemd.

> emergency workaround

I once really urgently needed `nmap` to do some production debugging ASAP. Unfortunately, the security tools would flag this immediately on my machine, as I knew this from previous experiments. Solution - compile my own binary from sources, then quickly rename it. I assume that this "workaround" was totally fine for sec department. At least production got fixed and money kept flowing.

xattr -cr <file> should clear the "download" extended attribute and make it as if the software was compiled on the machine itself, bypassing the ever-so-annoying Gatekeeper.

For binary patching: codesign --force --deep -s - <file> (no developer ID required, "ad-hoc signing" is just updating a few hashes here and there). Note that you should otherwise not use codesign as it is the job of the linker to do it.

There's extensive documentation. Examples:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/code-sign...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/notarizin...

There are dedicated sections of the developer web forums:

https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-topic

https://developer.apple.com/forums/topics/code-signing-topic...

...and there's an apple developer support person, Quinn, who appears to be heavily if not solely dedicated to helping developers do binary signing/notarization/stapling correctly.

They have written a slew of Tech Notes about signing and notarization. Main TN is at https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technotes/tn3125-i...

Quinn also has their email address in their sig so people can just reach out via email without even needing an Apple account, or if they prefer more confidentiality.

I mean, come on.

I understand that you're doing it on principle, but for a software development team, 99$/year is a really minuscule price to pay to be able to build / notarise / distribute software.

Developers pay exorbitant amount of money for much lesser value, and the idea of putting your teammates at risk to stick it to apple is kind of sad bordering with negligence from a business POV.

The main problem I had with living in a Gnome desktop environment, is with the keyboard. I'm not willing to abandon my use of Emacs control+meta sequences for cursor and editing movements everywhere in the GUI. On macOS, this works because the command (super/Win on Linux/Windows) key is used for common shortcuts and the control key is free for editing shortcuts.

I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I press the 'super/win/cmd' it activates a layer which maps certain sequences to their control equivalents, so I can create tabs, close windows, copy and paste (and many more) like my macOS muscle memory wants to do. Other super key sequences (like Super-L for lock desktop or Super-Tab for window cycling) are unchanged. Furthermore, when I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the Gnome equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc.

The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. So I installed a Gnome shell extension[1] that exports information about the active window state to a DBUS endpoint. That let me write a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.

After doing this, and tweaking my Gnome setup for another day or so, I am just as comfortable on my Linux machine as I was on my Mac. My main applications are Emacs, Firefox, Mattermost, Slack, ChatGPT, Discord, Kitty, and Steam. My Linux box was previously my Windows gaming box (don't get me started about frog boiling on Windows) and I'm amazed that I can play all my favorite titles (Manor Lords, Hell Let Loose, Foundation, Arma Reforager) on Linux with Proton.

[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[1]: https://github.com/hseliger/window-calls-extended

It doesn't matter whether it is anonymized. Apple has no business collecting information about what executables I am running on my own computer, or even whether I'm running executables at all. I don't care what their stated purpose is. I don't care what they want a "global view" of. It's my computer, not theirs.

I don't even mind that they've introduced a level on the totem pole that's above root. But on my computer, -I- should be the one at that level, not Apple.

I think it depends on what distro you're talking about. Corporate distros like RHEL and SLES are absolutely going that way. It takes a lot of effort to backport fixes, and the money's not there in desktop Linux to make it worth their while if containerization is a viable alternative. Red Hat's gotten rid of a bunch of graphical applications for RHEL 10 and stated that users can get them from Flathub as an alternative. I believe there was some consternation when CentOS Stream 10 launched without even a packaged web browser and the advice was to install Firefox from Flathub (there's a lot of use cases where that breaks stuff), but it appears they've walked that back and started providing Firefox as a traditional package.

However, less corporate distros that mostly just ship built upstream software as-is since they don't have to support it for long periods (think Arch, Fedora, Void, etc) don't have that problem, so I expect we'll continue seeing them use traditional packages.

"Immutable" distros? We used to live-boot those from optical media back in the day. Fedora is quite late to the game.

> I suspect Linux is going to go in a broadly similar direction.

Linux is pretty diverse, there are still distributions out there that haven't adopted systemd.

It is because the algorithm is worse. So many garbage results are showing up which they continue to allow.

Kagi lets me completely block specific domains. If Google cared about quality they’d let you do the same.

> being responsive to an increasingly sophisticated adversary

"Those who refuse to give up essential Liberty to purchase temporary Safety deserve to have to deal with the GNOME desktop user experience."

I miss macOS sometimes.

That rationalization ignores a lot of confounding evidence, such as other search engines being able to deliver great results and adequately keep the SEO garbage out.

The biggest struggle is that the original Macintosh was so simple to manage. The original concept of system extensions to expand the capabilities and the file structure built on the hierarchy with the desktop as the top level was broken with the shift to Unix.

Suddenly the users file hierarchy started wherever the Home folder was located and it became an island of user controlled environment surrounded by complexity of computer operating systems.

The result I found overall well thought out but when the desktop became just a folder I felt the Mac moved from it’s simplicity embracing the complexity that was offered by windows.

> Apple

Actively depleting the good-will they accumulated over the years definitely makes it worse. It's that harder to give the benefit of the doubt to a company also showing the middle finger to their Devs.

> Google

Giving priority to AdSense sites, fucking around with content lengths (famously penalising short stay sites), killing advanced search options. That's just thinking about it for 10s, but to me most of it is totally of Google's making.

Of course Google's algorithm is worse. Google prioritises showing you search results that make money for Google. Google has no incentive to show you anything else.

I can't believe I even have to say this out loud. Look up enshittification.

What OS are you talking about?

If Linux, you'll have to be more specific, because users don't use Linux. They use Android, Ubuntu, Gnome, pop!os, redhat etc.

Frustrating thing is the earlier versions worked well, it protected you from accidental things but the way to force it was clear and obvious. Now bypass is obtuse and requires enough work arounds people advise just disabling it which is also bad to normalize.

Don't disable SIP, clear the downloaded/quarantine extended attribute instead. This clears all extended attributes: xattr -cr <file> and bypasses the obnoxious GK.

Why remember all these little tricks Apple makes you do to use your own hardware?

An OS that won't let you do what you want to do is malware.

The more Gatekeeper, the more used people get to clicking OK without considering what it means. No amount of software can prevent the social engineering of an actual malware that tells the user to just click that OK button that they already have to do on a regular basis. Less is more here. It's why Windows tuned down their UAC after Vista.

Safe from what, exactly? Is this one of those state-actors-are-after-my-cat-photos delusions?

I was fully braced for Windows 11 being awful when I installed it recently but that hasn't been my experience at all. If anything it's just a slightly more polished Windows 10.

Probably helps that I installed the IoT LTSC version, but still, apart from the task bar being stupidly in the middle (thankfully there's an option to move it to the left), I've had zero issues.

I even added a network printer and it found it quickly, and added it quickly and successfully, which is a feat I don't think I've seen happen on any OS ever.

The context menu is a clear improvement on the old one (which you can still get to with one click).

Windows 11 can be usable if you run this debloat script [1]. Of course, with every update it's a constant game of cat and mouse.

1) https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

I just tested it. It's in the first row, last item. [Cut | Copy | Rename | Share | DELETE ]

Out of old habit I always use shift + DEL key and did not notice it's in the top row now.

Are you sure about that? Look for the trashcan symbol on the upper-right of the context menu.

I agree that having "more options" to begin with was a jarring experience coming from windows 10 though.

It's deliberate. It's the good-bad-good-bad release cycle Microsoft insists on. Windows 12 will be decent, then 13 will be horrible again.

Yeah the new context menu is horrible. Fortunately it can be set back to classic, I think with a registry edit

Also, every time you run something in Windows (whether it's part of the OS or an App) it can be a trip down memory lane, UI-wise. Oooh, this dialog is 2015 vintage! This dialog is styled like Windows 8! This one is from the XP era! Ohh, and that rarified dialog has controls that have not been changed since Windows 95!

If you want a super bad audio-related journey, try fixing external speakers connected to a Linux box. It's abysmal, and 99% of it can only be done via the CLI. Nothing wrong with that... but for something so normal I expected more ease-of-use.

Around four.

I'm a Windows fan (I actually really like 11) so I'm a bit biased, but I just dove back into macOS since 2014 and the settings app is truly terrible. The built in search barely works and the layout is so damn confusing. God forbid I install some remote desktop software, now I have to go to accessibility settings 5 simes and approve some permission that is strategically buried for only what I can tell as a way to thwart "normies" from enabling something via obfuscation.

It would be fine if the settings available were actually useful or at least could bring me to some tool that does it better. I get no meaningful report of what's eating my batter and why every time I open my MacBook it's dead. And if I want to change the actual resolution of my display I'm given just a list of scaling options pretending to be resolutions. Oh, want to set a specific resolution or refresh rate? You have to do some stupid kinger king foo of option control something _before_ you click on this dialog. I get the criticism about the Windows settings app and legacy power tools (I think this has largely been solved anyway), at least they exist and allow me some iota of control over my computer

To be fair, I agree with you that the recent OS X control panel changes suck shit and are awful, and get worse with every update.

It is resizable vertically but not horizontally as it doesn't make sense to resize the window horizontally considering the content of settings details panel (the right part of the settings window), you would end up with a lot of empty space if you were able to resize it horizontally.

Using search as a UI is admitting the UI sucks.

It is indicative of a failure, not a solution in and of itself.

I recently discovered that I can change audio settings on a mac by using the opt+volume shortcut and it takes me directly to the sound panel. Now if I could only make it stay on the built-in microphone instead of always switching to the worse sounding airpods one.

> You can access most settings by Windows + "yourquery".

The search doesn't even work all the time. Sometimes it won't do fuzzy search, sometimes typing "bluetooth settings" will do a Bing search, some other time it will open a PDF, and so on.

I... think so? Whichever one works with Microsoft Realms, which is the $2/month solution I settled on after somewhat-getting a self hosted server to run for a little bit on my desktop.

I figured that I make a six-figure salary as a software developer, I can afford $2/month so that I don't have to fucking become a sysadmin for a game server my child depends on.

Hey, if we're already complaining about Microsoft products, can someone explain why the Bedrock and Java versions of Minecraft have not been made cross-compatible in the TEN YEARS since the Mojang acquisition?

(... speaking as another dad just trying to play with my kid.)

Local iMessage storage is debilitating. I have over 90GB of iMessage history that I don't want deleted. The keep messages for x days removes it from iCloud and the Mac though. Why?

It's what they have available in the SwiftUI toolbox of "shitty widgets from mobile operating systems" though.

Thankfully, that is also somehow the future of UI frameworks on all of their platforms!

> Ever since Jobs came back (and Apple became valuable again) it has also become very much top-down with the engineers, for better or worse, not calling the shots. Just an obvious example — there are of course no engineers in the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not.

It's unclear how much explanatory value this has, because the Snow Leopard that everyone is pining for was during the Jobs era. After all, an Apple that goes bankrupt and out of business isn't going to make any software updates.

I find a stark difference between the Jobs era and the Cook era. Under Jobs, the early Mac OS X updates (Puma and Jaguar) came fast and furious, but then the schedule slowed considerably. Panther was 14 months, Tiger 18, Leopard 30 (delayed due to iPhone), Snow Leopard 22 months, Lion 23. Mountain Lion was the first release after the death of Jobs and came only 12 months after Lion. Thereafter, every Mac OS update came yearly, give or take a few months. That's a drastic change in release schedule.

It's crazy that marketing hasn't worked out that quality and reliability can be spun as a feature. In fact, I remember with OS X, that was the baseline word-of-mouth feature when the comparison was made with Windows at the time.

"It just works"

> Just an obvious example — there are of course no engineers in the decision to make a "Snow Leopard" release or not. That is a "marketing" decision.

I think it is more that the decision to SAY Snow Leopard was a bug fix-only release was a marketing one. The reality is that release also sported things like 64-bit Intel ports of all apps, added Grand Central Dispatch (e.g. an entirely new code concurrency system) and included a from-scratch Finder rewrite.

I always saw these releases (I bundle Mountain Lion in) were all about trying to rein in excessively long release cycles. Short release cycles tend to not have enough time to introduce new bugs, while extended release cycles create a sense of urgency to get code in under the wire.

Now, release cycles have moved to be staged across a fairly predictable annual calendar. If there's an issue where features are getting pushed out 6 months or a year earlier than they should, that is a management and incentives problem.

Yup. Well-said. I experienced exactly this type of thing during every NMOS planning/brainstorming session I was a part of.

>Because, you know, you already shipped with it ... must not be that bad.

This hits right in the feels of any engineer at any company.

In modern UIKit it's as simple as constraining to the keyboard layout guide. That gives you full animation support for free as well, no more need to listen for the notification and manually set up animations with the same timing and curve. On iPads the keyboard guide can even help you avoid the split keyboard, it's really nice.

Of course SwiftUI gives you almost none of this control, forcing you to hope the magic automatic support works how you expect.

But then neither help you with any of the other interactions, like any background dimming you may want, or tapping away from the keyboard to dismiss. That has to be done manually.

Absolutely. And turning off Siri's "Learn from this app" should not require the user to navigate to every single app's menu, when Siri has a top level page in Settings.

Yes, I am very surprised to hear that you've had such success with reporting bugs to Apple. That is very unlike my experience. I've had exactly one macOS bug that I reported fixed, and that required going to a WWDC lab, talking to a person on the relevant team in person, and having them dig the bug report out of the backlog for a completely unrelated team that it was incorrectly assigned to.

They would be surprised because it's not true, those years-old bugs in the forums have been reported many times to the official bug tracker, with reference number sometimes posted in those very forums.

You must be the lucky one, because other people have had horrible experiences with Apple’s Feedback Assistant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38164735

Interesting. Apple podcasters frequently rant about what a black hole Apple's Radar bug system is. We're talking hours-long rants in some cases. Luck of the draw, maybe? I'm not doubting you, just surprised to read it.

(It feels similar to how those same podcasters absolutely blast Apple Intelligence, while non-tech users I've heard from seem to love it.)

I think they’re painted into a corner with WWDC. Everything has to be a crowd pleasing brain busting wow drop each year. I’m certain there are teams that design their entire workflow around the yearly wwdc. It honestly feels like an executive leadership problem to solve.

Sure, more and better of everything, with engineering, including QA, calling the shots on what's sufficient to ensure great quality.

Being infinitely rich might also be the cause of the problem.

Well, you can only win playing the stock market (Wall St. is Cook's only real customer) for so long while your products deteriorate. Financializing Apple and eliminating its technical prowess opens the door for the someone else with contemporary technical strength to take Apple's users.

You need to run it under MLX, and AFAICT ComfyUI and the like are not really optimized for it (or at least not as optimized as LLM inference).

Opencore legacy patcher would be to differ.

Unfortunately, “decades old hardware” doesn’t give me the combination of speed, quietness, battery life and the ability to use my laptop on my lap without so much heat that it puts me at risk for never having any little Scarfaces.

Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone.

Still better than the butterfly debacle of 2016-2019. I have one for work that spends 99.9% of its life docked to a real keyboard and it still has keys that only work sporadically. Some of these keys probably have < 10,000 actuations on them.

Not OP but have the same Mac. Every key is shiny. Doesn't really bother me though because I touch type. Also clearly I favor hitting space with my right hand because only the right side is shiny.

If you have AppleCare they will basically rebuild your MacBook for ~$200. I got MBP M1 Max usb ports and top case replaced and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t even ask for but they replaced with new stuff. Felt like a new machine when I got it back.

'Gaming laptops' with more powerful GPUs are generally awful, though. Even ignoring the state of Win11.

Yes, they can theoretically perform better, but only when plugged into mains power, and creating so much heat and fan noise that the experience really isn't good.

Don't think there's anything out there that will outperform the GPU of an M-series Mac without consuming way more power and producing problematic levels of heat+noise.

M1 Max @ 32 GB. I can run Shadow of the Tomb Raider with max settings at native resolution (3024x1964 px) and get ~60 FPS.

What about M3 Max?