There is also a contingent of UNIX users who use Mac OS X pragmatically. I have never had the illusion that Apple wasn't a consumer device company at heart. But Macs have been great UNIX workstations for the last decade or so. Once they make more serious attempts to turn their laptop line into 'iOS computers', I'll switch back to Linux or BSD. But for now, it is good hardware with a good UNIX operating system.
I just bought a MacBook Air last week, after a 2 year break without a Mac laptop. I had been using Lion and Mountain Lion on a Mac Mini, but the last week or so have been a revelation for me. Crazy battery life (about 9 hours of normal programming), full screen apps with swiping to switch between them, fast fast fast at everyday operations thanks to the SSD, the whole thing is at the same time a major turn towards iDevice-ification, and a giant leap forward in usability for laptops.
I wonder how many people worrying about iOS-ification are:
a) running Lion, where the transition was still in mid-course, or
b) using a desktop, where the design decisions aren't so obviously right (my Mac Mini for example has a huge monitor, hence I'm less inclined to use full-screen apps)
In case a), there were definite weakness in Lion. Full-screen apps hadn't yet made their near-global appearance, and Spaces was ... weird. These problems have been shaken out in Mountain Lion. For b) it seems to me that OSX has been optimised for the laptop environment, where screen real-estate is limited. If you aren't using full-screen as your standard app config, you're missing out on some of what makes Mountain Lion a great experience).
When I compare all of this to the laptop I use at work, a Dell running Fedora, there is no comparison. My Mac is a far, far better development machine (well, aside from the fact that brew is weak sauce compared to a full-blown yum, but then this is not news). It's not a question of there being pros and cons on each side, my Mac is simply better for pretty much any metric I care to imagine.
Which is not to say that some people may not have genuine grievances with the current Mac platform. I just wanted to add my own personal experience - going from being mildly disappointed by Lion to completely wowed by Mountain Lion.
- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people.
- The whole-screen app stuff is a good idea, but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors, which many geeks use (the problem is: when you go full screen on one monitor, the other no longer shows anything by gray linen)
- Many features were removed for what seems to be no good reason, e.g. RSS feeds.
- Some iPad-like behaviors make little sense on a desktop, e.g. automatically closing Safari if idle for a while. It takes several seconds to open a web link just because it has to relaunch the application.
- Annoying for my company, Taodyne (3D presentations): stereoscopy used to be perfectly stable on 10.6, unstable since 10.7, to the point of causing kernel panics or system freezes regularly.
- Memory management has been a weak point since Rhapsody. In Rhapsody, you could crash the system simply by zooming in Preview. Today, you can still halt your top-of-the-line system to a crawl simply by running a process that eats all available memory. I'd much rather have an easy quota system where I can say "unless otherwise specified, no app can take more than 1/4th of available RAM". Or a paging system that makes smarter decisions and keeps the "interactive" stuff resident enough that I can still kill the offending process.
- Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears. Or the keyboard that sometimes forgets half the keys you type. Or Safari that stops refreshing part of the screen. Or moving a window across monitors that now causes the window and background icons to blink. And so on. Lion does not feel as polished as Snow Leopard.
Overall, I still like Apple products, but I definitely see them losing their edge on the software quality front. I think that Maps on iOS is just the most glaring example, but it's not the only one.
- Lion is very fast with a SSD, but definitely slower than 10.6 with a regular hard disk. Hence the difference in perception between various people.
I'd like to see this backed up by numbers. Sure, Lion and Mountain Lion are quite slow on spinning platters, but OS X feels almost an order of magnitude faster since I had an SSD. Much faster than Snow Leopard with a hard disk. The numbers are also on my side, an SSD completely blows away hard disks both in access times and read/write speed.
but the implementation sucks on multiple monitors
Indeed. Big time. It works ok on the road, but when I have an external screen connected I never use full screen support. It would be easy to make things better: allow users to put another full-screen application (or desktop) on the secondary screen.
Tons of annoying little bugs at the lowest levels, and you really wonder what was broken there that they needed to fix. Like the mouse cursor that sometimes disappears.
I really disliked Lion for all its bugs. But things have been steadily improving since Mountain Lion, to the point where even iMessage works most of the time in 10.8.2 ;).
I think c3d is right in that Lion and Mountain Lion are slower than Snow Leopard if you don't have an SSD. It seems to me that recently Apple have been designing OSX with SSD-equipped computers as the target. They assume that you will have fast read times, and use algorithms to optimise that. For example, they 'deactivate' applications that aren't being used, because they know they can restart them from SSD very quickly, which in turn frees up physical RAM, which speeds the computer up elsewhere. The problem is that if you don't have an SSD, this decision is catastrophic for performance. As always, Apple are skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it is...
Apple has made no attempts to turn Macs into "iOS." it's copied some features, like full screen, but the system is as developer friendly as ever (and more unix compatible than ever).
