True, but it is not a tool that works for everyone.
In my case, I consider the Mac one of the cons of working at my current place of work. My days are filled with minor hassles that I could really do without. Doing simple things takes longer, and I have to deal with random freezes, slowdowns and even crashes that I did not have to deal with when using my own laptop for similar needs over the past couple of years (mostly dev related with minor content editing).
So again, it is a tool, but it is not the best tool for the job for every person, especially developers.
Random freezes, slowdowns and crashes? Care to elaborate? What languages and tooling are you using that is giving that sort of grief? That is completely counter my experience.
Sounds like the poster is having power management issues. Could be a dirty fan or a bad chip. I’ve dealt with the latter and it was fixed under warranty.
I've been using a MacBook Pro 2015 for a while now for my personal stuff - it's been nothing but reliable for everything from programming to surfing the web to DJ mixing. Just recently, the battery cycles exceeded normal usage and I got a notification from the system that the 'Battery should be replaced soon' - almost as soon as this happened, I experienced random slowdowns, freezing, etc just doing low-intensity tasks like browsing this site. Open up Activity Monitor and find that the 'kernel_task' is absolutely throttling my CPU. Long story short, this particular MacBook Pro had a battery recall and Apple replaced mine for free - worked just like new after that, which I'm grateful for since it's basically the best laptop I've ever used.
I normally don't participate in these type of discussions on this one I will make an exception.
Macs are extremely bad in terms of thermal management in the long run. Yes sure, they will work absolutely fine in the store but they will slow down with your dev environment installed.
1. The Apple store is cooler and has better airflow than your cubicle/desk/room.
2. The vanilla operating system runs fast on any computer and os
3. intel CPUs are getting extremely hot when doing everyday ops on the computer (too early to talk about M class CPUs)
4. Random freezes are a real thing and there isn't much you can do about it.
5. Logic board changes are also a thing, I've witnessed temperature sensors breaking because of the bad thermals.
6. fan noise is awful. yes it won't run in the store or when the computer is new, but you will definitely notice once the issues begin
7. macbooks are not made to work with monitors - they support them. the primary usecase for a apple laptop is to work without a monitor. so be surprised if your monitor is not supported.
8. on pre m1 cpus any external monitor was also triggering the radeon gpus to fire up, causing thermal throttling to become active very quickly. kernel_task anyone?
This is a long one. recommended workarounds are:
- disabling turbo boost (why buy a "pro" computer in first place?)
- buying an egpu (external gpu) with an average price of $700
- use custom fan programs that ignore the SMC reported temparatures and dictate their own fan speed (can cause further thermal damage)
Try taking your intel macbook to the apple store and ask about this problem. they will really tell you that they have never heard about it. now try searching google and you will see thousands of people with the very same issues. apple will absolutely stonewall the issue and claim that you are the only person in the world experiencing this problem.
the list could go on for much longer but I'm too tired for that.
Do yourself a favor, if you are not planning to travel with the device, buy yourself a decent desktop computer with sufficient cooling for half the price.
I owned an Intel Mac and now own an M1 Max. The Intel and M1 are completely different beasts. My Intel would die in an hour and was always hot with the fan running. The battery life on my M1 is ridiculous. Hours and hours. I don't even know if it has a fan. It's silent and runs cool.
For me, the issue is that Mac isn't what we deploy to. We spend so mamy man-hours working around Mac-specific issues when we exclusively deploy to x86 Linux at the end of the day. M1 has brought even more issues with the architecture change, to the point where I'd say ~50% of our DevOps time is spent solving Mac issues. It sucks.
In my case, I consider the Mac one of the cons of working at my current place of work. My days are filled with minor hassles that I could really do without. Doing simple things takes longer, and I have to deal with random freezes, slowdowns and even crashes that I did not have to deal with when using my own laptop for similar needs over the past couple of years (mostly dev related with minor content editing).
So again, it is a tool, but it is not the best tool for the job for every person, especially developers.