Secret Mac Owners Thread

Rys

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I put the word Secret at the front of the thread title so that non Mac owners wouldn't be able to see it and mock us. I think that's how selective thread participation works anyway, phew.

So, yeah, I pretty much just hate using Windows and have done for a while now. I've been a Mac user full-time at home since late 2009. There, I said it. Windows is just death by papercut for me, and while OS X is far from perfect, I'm just much more at peace with how it works compared to the alternatives.

My use of a personal computer these days is limited to writing, making sure the forums are alive and well, and cross platform development. No gaming, sorry.

So for that kind of stuff, something powerful, yet where I can be at peace with the thing as much as possible, means I've landed in Mac land.

Any other closet Mac owners lurking, terrified to admit it around here?
 
I use a Mac and don't like it. Coming from Linux, it is just a pain in comparison. Programming with Fortran, Latex all is suboptimal...tomorrow, I install a linux VM.

Why I changed from Linux? Nowadays, I get lots of MS documents from administration like Word etc...this is still not well supported in my experience under Linux, so Mac OS has a terminal and supports MS documents...but it is not optimal for me.

Other things are compareable convinient as Linux.

Windows and work??? Naa..windows is a gaming platform only imo, basically a Steam carrier :)
 
wait.. im not a mac owner.... why i can see this?

but im a hackintosh owner a few years ago... and use my friend's macbook many many years ago... ah! thats why :)


weird, my experience with Mac is the opposite of Rys. I never able to get something simply "done" with mac. as far as i remembered it crash/stutter too much, too hard to transfer stuff. but i dont remember what the heck i'm transferring, i just remembered it was a pain to do.

one thing i remember as positive on mac. It boot really fast :D (including post-boot, you can quickly run app. while in windows i need to wait it to "settle" to be able to run apps. If i open too fast, windows will stall like mad and start menu search wont work).
 
5 year old macbook pro still my goto machine 99% of time at home. For just reading the web, writing stuff and accounts, etc it's flawless. It sits in a nice balance between just getting stuff done simply, having office and also having a terminal if you want to fix something.
You still need a decent PC/console if you play games.
For coding and heavy lifting it's hard to beat a decent 8+ core windows/linux box with a ton of cheap RAM but that's what remote desktop is for. :)

Not all roses but still think it's the best general user OS. Apple have let a few things slide through in the last few OSX releases though - just stupid stuff like turning on drive encryption (file vault) has the side effect of stopping backlit keyboards working before you log in while you can't see the keys. You still see websites that are incompatible with safari now and again (easily solved). There's still general incompatibilities - eg: Steam link boxes are currently not working on OSX (will be solved by Valve soon I'm sure but indicative). I still don't know where most files actually are on the hard disk most of the time which can be a pain in the ass when you need to find one.

But when I compare it to the absolute mess that is linux for just trying to resolve dependencies if something doesn't install properly / you want some slightly unusual support for audio/visual output; or windows gradually losing performance over time from just tons of random crap creeping into running in the background it's impressive. I ask a lot less of OSX than I do of the other OS' though so it probably skews my opinion but if you're happy in the walled garden of things that can run on it everything just works most of the time.
 
I love my Mac! I bought the latest model of MBPR to replace my 2006 MB plastic one. Excellent upgrade. Hard to best the overall package and I really like OS X.
 
Sorry but Mac hate is just misplaced. My MBPR 15" is just perfection. Having to go back to my PC at work hurts my heart every day. Well, not that I go to the office every day but you get my drift.
 
rMBP 15" owner here, with a Mac Mini on my desktop at work.

They're very popular in my profession (astronomy), attending astronomy conferences is like going to an Apple sales convention, room full of glowing Apple logos. It's the combination of a UNIX-like command-line (most professional astronomy software is UNIX/Linux), a decent GUI and compatibility with MS Office that appeals I think.

I have some Windows 7 & 10 desktops at home for family use, but I'm seriously considering ditching those.
 
Sorry but Mac hate is just misplaced. My MBPR 15" is just perfection. Having to go back to my PC at work hurts my heart every day. Well, not that I go to the office every day but you get my drift.

hmm, nowadays none of my friend use mac so i cant try it :(
i guess i'll need to try hackintosh again. Hopefully latest mac os already have hackintosh available for my hardware.

with OS updates, i have my mind open for better stuff. (also open for worse stuff from what i experienced in horrible, cumbersome, and annowying W10)
 
rMBP 15" owner the day it became available in 2012. It's fantastic. Kid uses an 7 year old MacBook Air 11" with 2GB of RAM. Very happy with it too. (Probably doesn't know any better?) I still have an older unibody MacBook and MacMini somewhere.
Everything is Apple basically. iPhone 6 for me, a 5 for my wife (she will soon switch to a 6s), and a 5 for the kid as well. iPad Air for kid, iPad 3 Mini for wife.

I have a PC as well, but I've lost interest in game long ago and it never gets switched on. Would take a whole day to download updates probably.

I'm not completely unhappy with Windows: it's good enough to run Cygwin and Linux in a VirtualBox at work! But there's always little things that annoy me about it. And most Windows running laptops are trash compared to MacBooks.

I don't actively try to hide being an Apple fan though.
 
I really like certain aspects of my 5K iMac (the screen is goddamm amazing) but some things irritate me.

Linux doesn't have very good support for this mac. You can only do 4K and there are bugs with the sound card (it doesn't resample properly).

You can't do 5K from windows either, and the graphic drivers seem very outdated. But I haven't tried it myself....

It has a bit of an unpleasant noice. My previous iMac felt queter...

A lot of the media players on macos (like VLC) seem to have problems with certain files (stutters and such) that mplayer and gst-launch under Fedora Linux plays perfectly.
 
I have a PowerMac 7500 in my closet. Got it free from a guy at work. Had fun messing with it and re-living high school for about a week. Considering recycling it now.

I've repaired a few modern Macs for people. I wouldn't buy one for myself though. They are fine but I just don't get any special thrills from them.
 
It has a bit of an unpleasant noice. My previous iMac felt queter...
I've got a 5K too and under load it sounds different to my old one (27" 2009), but I wouldn't say it's louder. Most of the time it's completely silent, of course.

I don't dual-boot any other OS. If I want to run Windows or Linux, I use a VM (VMWare Fusion).
 
Have a 13" Macbook Pro from 2011, with a thunderbolt display. I both love and hate them. One, this combo is very very nice to use, as long as you don't demand too much out of it. Safari on the 27" display in fullscreen running under yosemite and my magic mouse is such a sweet experience. Even on crappy old dual-core Sandy's IGP, the browser runs fast and smooth. Sound is handled really well; you automatically switch from internal speaker to display speakers just by plugging in the thunderbolt cable. Plug in iPhones headset, you can adjust volume up and down with the remote, and the mic works too; great for Skype calls and stuff. The middle button doesn't mute sound or anything like that tho - it's hardcoded to start friggin iTunes, which is one big WTF moment, but whatever. :LOL: Insert optical audio cable - boom, you get digital out through the headphones jack, for example for watching surround sound DVD movies or something. It Just Works.

Then there's tons of quirks and niggles with Macs and OSX, things that are needlessly difficult to do or hidden away in annoying places just because Apple's too busy earning billions of dollars to spend some man hours fixing this stuff.

Anyways, something's effed up with either my Mac or the screen, because the screen will go completely blank every so often and won't come back on without rebooting the Mac, and often this doesn't even work. Replugging power and data cables don't help either. This problem has become progressively worse over a couple years now, and now I can't even use my screen anymore. It's essentially dead, so when I wanna Mac I now have to leech off of my PC's display instead via a DVI cable, locking me to 1080P as best rez. Even so, the screen randomly enters power save, so I think something's screwy with the macbook's display circuitry somehow. Probably not worth repairing though, my Applecare ran out long ago now and the logic board would cost shitloads to replace I bet.
 
For you guys with iMac, did you feel it was a better value than owning a rMBP?
 
There's no shame in owning a Macbook, iMac or MacMini.
But the shame of owning a "trash bin" Mac Pro should be kept secret.
 
I've got a 5K too and under load it sounds different to my old one (27" 2009), but I wouldn't say it's louder. Most of the time it's completely silent, of course.

I don't dual-boot any other OS. If I want to run Windows or Linux, I use a VM (VMWare Fusion).
Ah! I've got a 27" late 2009 iMac, really like it, and it doubles as a monitor for my PC. For someone with a serious interest in photography, the 5K iMac (or if LGs leaked 8K materializes) has a strong lure of course, and eventually I'll buy one.
I'm waiting for FinFET GPUs though, and would really like it if it could be used as a PC monitor again. Maybe, though I doubt it, DP 1.3 will somehow become available, regardless of connector.

( I've used macs since the Mac Plus back when I was a grad student, and the Mac II with it's 68881 floating point processor and colour screen was a great calculational and graphics research tool. It's interesting to see how the arguments against macs have morphed during the years, even if I was done with that discussion 25 years ago.
Always used other OSs in parallel though, but kept the important stuff on the macs. Not only were they more stable, the straightforwardness of booting them from attached storage made problems easy to handle. Even today, I find macs remarkably stable, and since SSDs got popular coffee related incidents seem to be the main issue. :D )
 
Anyways, something's effed up with either my Mac or the screen, because the screen will go completely blank every so often and won't come back on without rebooting the Mac, and often this doesn't even work. Replugging power and data cables don't help either. This problem has become progressively worse over a couple years now, and now I can't even use my screen anymore.

This is going to sound stupid but work with me... I encountered this once and couldn't work out what the hell was going on and thought the machine was dead. In my case it was some weird mode it had got itself into where it kept showing the login/password screen at startup and coming out of screensaver but it woke up with the screen backlight off. If it's the same issue then you need to shine a torch/light through the apple logo on the back and it behaves like the backlight. You should be able to see the login box that way and get in - if it's the same issue the back light will wake up and work fine as it's unlocking. I can't remember what I did to stop it doing it but it was a couple of google searches away. If it's the same thing then I'm sure you'll be able to find it.
 
@PixResearch Nah, this is something else. When it hits, the entire thunderbolt interface goes MIA; it disappears entirely from the hardware information window thingy (accessible from the "about my mac" feature.)

I'm thinking it could be a software issue, but it has persisted through multiple OS releases (installed both as upgrades and from clean slate), and also firmware patches both for my macbook and the thunderbolt display. If it's a software glitch then it's an extraordinarily persistent one. :p
 
I take a Macbook Air to work and business every day and I keep a Mini on my desk. I find the OSX environment great to work in, but, am not a true convert.
Both of them keep a Windows Boot Camp ready - for whatever - and my other and primary desktop is Windows as well.
And all of them need at least one Linux environment ready in a VM and/or bootable.

When it comes to mobile phone I'm similarly non-committal. I have an iPhone with me for one of my phone numbers but my main phone is a Nexus.
Compared to Android IOS feels like having one hand tied behind my back, though.
OSX doesn't have that particular problem. I'd be happy to use it full time if more software was available natively, and games ran better.
I don't like all-in-ones like the iMac but whenever a Mac laptop or Mini comes along that has an Nvidia option OSX for me puts it at a great competitive advantage vs other brands.
 
I once used a Mac that ran Firefox, so I was pleased that the user had the same browser taste as me.
There was bluetooth sound with some latency, but it may have come from the receiving hardware and the bluetooth transmission was used for music not video or games, so it was fine.
The mouse is fine as long as there is left button, right button and scroll wheel.
 
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