Apple's hardware-software bundling (which is actually technically illegal at least in some countries, but there's little incentive to act on that); Apple OS X' nasty EULA;
Can you list these countries, and explain exactly what is illegal?
Which part of their EULA do you think is nasty?
Specifically, I hear that OS X has been recently updated so that mb's video output doesn't work in GNU/Linux anymore.
Are you saying that old hardware that used to work fine with Linux has been broken by an OS X update? That sounds implausible, can you link to a source, or elaborate a bit?
very pricey for what you get
I think this is an unfair summary. The prices have generally been comparable (I’d estimate 90–120% of the price, depending on what time you make the comparison) to similarly specced and equally solidly built machines from other vendors. They just don’t bother competing at the cutthroat low end, where most other laptop sales happen.
Retina support is not perfect in Linux. Cinnamon supports it natively, but some programs, that you may run inside it, don't. This problem can be solved running Linux in a VM instead of natively.
It’s pretty unfortunate that many Linux and Windows apps still don’t handle high-resolution displays very well.
Apple had a big advantage in controlling both hardware and software, so that they could jump directly to 2x resolution. They actually experimented for several years with more arbitrary UI resizing, and found that it didn’t work very well w/r/t backwards compatibility with old software. The jump to 2x by 2x resolution, once high-enough display panels could be found and once GPUs were powerful enough to support it within the available thermal envelope was a pretty brilliant hack, in my opinion, which has worked out really well. After a few years of using a ~200 PPI display, going back to ~100–150 PPI is like wearing glasses smeared with vaseline.
Other software platforms were stuck trying to interoperate with whatever arbitrary displays dozens of different OEMs decided to use, which meant that display resolution was all over the map, and a simple doubling strategy was impossible. Both Windows and Linux have tried to add support for arbitrary UI resizing, but it isn’t supported by all application software and hits lots of weird buggy edge cases. IMO poor high-resolution display support is one of the biggest problems still with devices like MS Surface tablets.
Just a reminder that Apple keyboards are ****.
Compared to what? This is a keyboard forum, so I’m sure everyone has obscure preferences, but in my opinion all the scissor-switch boards are pretty terrible, and Apple’s are among the least ****ty of the bunch. If you need a better typing experience, get an external keyboard and call it a day.
The only real way out is to use something dramatically thicker, like
low-profile Topre or similar. Nobody making reasonably portable laptops is willing to spend that much space on the keyboard though.
I went into a “Microsoft Store” a few months ago, and tried every keyboard there. There wasn’t anything that I particularly enjoyed typing on. Most of them were incredibly unpleasant. I was reasonably impressed with the MS Surface “type cover”, for being less ****ty than I expected given its extreme thinness, but I still wouldn’t want to type on it for any extended amount of time. HP, Toshiba, Dell, Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Sony, etc. have keyboards which range from roughly-comparable-to-Macbook-Pro down to worthless trash.
(I think the 12" Macbook has a very unpleasant keyboard, certainly worse than previous Apple laptops. Only worthwhile if extreme portability is more important than typing.)
I read the reviews for El Capitan (that had the spectacular rating of 2.5 on iTunes Store) and decided to stay with Mavericks.
I have one machine on 10.9 (Mavericks), and one machine on 10.11 (El Capitan), and I think both are fine. The main OS version to avoid was 10.10 (Yosemite), which switched to Helvetica as a UI typeface (barf) and had all kinds of network problems caused by a poorly implemented new DNS daemon.
10.11 fixed a pile of bugs, and I haven’t heard many complaints about the recent point releases. (As always, wait for version 10.x.3 or 10.x.4 before upgrading; the first few point releases always hit weird issues.)
You can’t trust aggregated review score for this kind of thing, the only people who are going to bother writing a review of an OS update are folks who have had some problem, and a non-negligible proportion of the problems have nothing to do with the OS update per se. (E.g. hardware issues, dodgy third-party device drivers, ...)
