With the touchpad, by decent you mean the best in the business, nothing else comes close. I don’t personally like their mouse and keyboard either, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad, just not for me. I like my mechanical keyboard and chunky mouse.
I was actually selling Apple gear when they released the Mighty mouse. It sounded AWESOME. We were so excited. On their ads, it sounded like we’d get a product with touchpad buttons basically that killed their previous (worse) puck mice.
What we got, was an overpriced mouse which was near-damned impossible to click the right button (you got RSI every time you tried) and which was physical click.
Microsoft’s super cheap basic mice we sold 10x faster (at least), and were 1/3rd the price
The reality is, they really f*** up most of their products, but people make excuses for them. Even the iPod shuffle, there were good cheap alternatives (I had one), and mine even had a display. OSX 10 used to have corrupt preferences regularly, SMB was crap until at least OSX 10.5, etc. One release, there was a bug where the network broke completely after a few minutes (there is no way anyone couldn’t have noticed during testing)
My Mac Studio M2 was the only computer I have ever had that had compatibility issues with some USB-C cables (and, it was a few of them from differing brands). Antenna gate, and they tried to water down the problems, by comparing to other manufacturers and said “if you hold them in this totally unrealistic way, you have similar issues”
Apple’s following is cult like. Though they don’t usually have major issues like Windows does, there are a fair number of Apple apologists.
Microsoft’s following is more…stockholm-like.
MS did make some decent mice though. For a while, all I would buy was Intellimouses. Going back to like, balls. Not to mention my cool blue serial MS Home mouse. Then I was a Logitech guy for a while (especially after having to deal with their warranty process, like, one of the best, up there with Anker. At least, several years ago. Who knows what’s changed since).
Decent gamepads for the era too. Sidewinder Gamepad was top-notch. I played loads of Quake with that before I learned about WASD. This is pre-analog, and I was actually pretty decent with it, iirc. Not nearly as good as I got to be with WASD tho.
Nowadays I love my Elecom Huge and 8bitdo gamepads.
I won’t be an apple apologist: I’ve gone a decade without buying a new laptop because they were going through their crappy “butterfly keyboard”-phase, and I would never buy one of their mice (I use a >15 year old wired mouse that just works).
That said, if you want a machine that has top-of-the-line hardware, with a UNIX OS, and also the convenience of a commercially polished product, I don’t see any viable alternatives. I’ve used Linux a bit, and that’s pretty close. The only edge MacOS has on Linux is the simple convenience of having things like photos sync directly between units, and very good native support for backups via time capsule. Sure, you can configure/set up the same things on a Linux machine, but that would require some time+effort.
I’ve been thinking of setting up a self-hosted cloud storage for backups for a while. If I get around to that, I might finally make the switch. Regardless, I must admit that no one else is even close to delivering an as streamlined product as apple, that also lets me use Linux-forums when I need to figure out how to use some CLI tool.
Or a good keyboard.
They can make a decent touchpad. They can do a pretty nice touch gui. They still make beautiful displays. But they can’t handle the essentials.
Also trackballs > mouse any day.
With the touchpad, by decent you mean the best in the business, nothing else comes close. I don’t personally like their mouse and keyboard either, but I wouldn’t say it’s bad, just not for me. I like my mechanical keyboard and chunky mouse.
(at one point, Apple made a couple of the best keyboards)
I was actually selling Apple gear when they released the Mighty mouse. It sounded AWESOME. We were so excited. On their ads, it sounded like we’d get a product with touchpad buttons basically that killed their previous (worse) puck mice.
What we got, was an overpriced mouse which was near-damned impossible to click the right button (you got RSI every time you tried) and which was physical click.
Microsoft’s super cheap basic mice we sold 10x faster (at least), and were 1/3rd the price
The reality is, they really f*** up most of their products, but people make excuses for them. Even the iPod shuffle, there were good cheap alternatives (I had one), and mine even had a display. OSX 10 used to have corrupt preferences regularly, SMB was crap until at least OSX 10.5, etc. One release, there was a bug where the network broke completely after a few minutes (there is no way anyone couldn’t have noticed during testing)
My Mac Studio M2 was the only computer I have ever had that had compatibility issues with some USB-C cables (and, it was a few of them from differing brands). Antenna gate, and they tried to water down the problems, by comparing to other manufacturers and said “if you hold them in this totally unrealistic way, you have similar issues”
I think this sounds just a tad biased.
Apple’s following is cult like. Though they don’t usually have major issues like Windows does, there are a fair number of Apple apologists.
Microsoft’s following is more…stockholm-like.
MS did make some decent mice though. For a while, all I would buy was Intellimouses. Going back to like, balls. Not to mention my cool blue serial MS Home mouse. Then I was a Logitech guy for a while (especially after having to deal with their warranty process, like, one of the best, up there with Anker. At least, several years ago. Who knows what’s changed since).
Decent gamepads for the era too. Sidewinder Gamepad was top-notch. I played loads of Quake with that before I learned about WASD. This is pre-analog, and I was actually pretty decent with it, iirc. Not nearly as good as I got to be with WASD tho.
Nowadays I love my Elecom Huge and 8bitdo gamepads.
I won’t be an apple apologist: I’ve gone a decade without buying a new laptop because they were going through their crappy “butterfly keyboard”-phase, and I would never buy one of their mice (I use a >15 year old wired mouse that just works).
That said, if you want a machine that has top-of-the-line hardware, with a UNIX OS, and also the convenience of a commercially polished product, I don’t see any viable alternatives. I’ve used Linux a bit, and that’s pretty close. The only edge MacOS has on Linux is the simple convenience of having things like photos sync directly between units, and very good native support for backups via time capsule. Sure, you can configure/set up the same things on a Linux machine, but that would require some time+effort.
I’ve been thinking of setting up a self-hosted cloud storage for backups for a while. If I get around to that, I might finally make the switch. Regardless, I must admit that no one else is even close to delivering an as streamlined product as apple, that also lets me use Linux-forums when I need to figure out how to use some CLI tool.