Why I hate MacBook and macOS

09/06/2020 FN Comments 0 Comment

I use MacBook for a few months I have to respond to questions “Why do you like MacBook” quite often. But to be honest, there are some things I really hate!

Note: I am using Macbook Air 2019, 13″, i5 1.6 GHz, 16 GB RAM and 128 GB SSD

1. Everybody claims how perfect it is

But it is not. I have plenty of GUI/system/HW bugs caught on video and this can happen. But “the community” is always saying how Windows is buggy, on Linux you have to debug wifi for 5 days before using it – but macOS is perfect! … except that’s not true.

2. Price

Yes, I have to complain about the pricing strategy of Apple, because it is ridiculous. Everybody knows the famous $999 monitor stand, but how about other products? Aren’t they overpriced a bit? In addition, you cannot change RAM or SSD because they are soldered to the motherboard (unless you are Louis Rossmann).

3. Upgrades

It is nearly impossible to perform HW upgrade of you Macbook (because of components are soldered) which is unfortunate.

4. Performance

I am working as a DevOps consultant. I use my IDE, Terminal and Google but the power of my Air is not enough. RAM is constantly fine, SWAP is described in point 5., CPU is around 70 %, but Mac is freezing, lagging and not working smoothly (being on the charger all the time) so I need to close browser windows and IDEA Projects often…

5. SWAP

I have 16 GB of RAM and only 128 GB of SSD. This cause a lot of troubles with SWAP. This mighty feature somehow eats my free space during 50 % of my RAM is free. So I constantly run out of space (128 GB is just not enough for nothing) and Mac is screaming “Running out of space” and push me to delete some apps…

6. Fullscreen bugs

Well, you might say “this is the issue of the application” but I would say it is poor design instead. When I am using some application on fullscreen and popup appears (for example is Merge windows in IntelliJ IDEA), my current space is changed to the first one with all ‘none full screen’ windows and there this popup opens. Okay, so I scroll horizontally to this space, but MacOS would like to keep me in the fullscreen one where IDEA is living. So I am rollback there automatically. So I scroll again and again. And this does not happen only with IDEA, but with other products too. I am moved across spaces whenever some application wants attention and opens some new window! This is super annoying.

6.1 Browser tabs to Windows

Imagine 2 open tabs, you would like to keep them in one fullscreen window. You want to change the order of tabs and move this tab a bit off the top bar and suddenly macOS recognizes, you would like to have another fullscreen window…

So instead of changing the order of tabs, you have two fullscreen windows with your browser and to merge them, you have to exit fullscreen on one of them and then mooooove across all spaces and pray not to lift finger and lose this window.

6.2 Topbar issues and bugs

I like the topbar. I used it on Linux, like it on Mac but… Those small icons on the left side are fine unless you have an application with more available settings so they override those icons. Icons cannot be closed or hidden because they represent running application so… shame.

https://youtu.be/KqVfdnDj01M

7. Finder

This app is god and evil together. It is very simple and nice, however, I do not understand why I cannot see the full path of files and use this path in some search or address bar…