After 39 years I am really getting annoyed with being a Mac user

[darkgoob]

I was optimistic about Apple Silicon at first, and even bought an M1 laptop. But now that I've had an M1 MacBook Pro for over a year, and it's already been replaced with the M2 before most of the things I wanted to use with it got released (some of which I've learned will never be ported to Apple Silicon, with no upgrade path besides eBay.

For any existing Mac owners, going through this transition to M1 is very costly and slow. My audio interfaces aren't supported on Apple Silicon so that's another $2000-3000 for new gear that does have Apple Silicon drivers. My audio plugins either won't ever be updated or will require expensive paid updates. I can't run Bootcamp anymore. The games that actually benefit from Apple Silicon can be counted on two hands.

Meanwhile we still don't have an affordable, upgradeable, modular Mac tower to replace the 2009/2012 Mac Pro. I've been waiting for more than 10 years now. Now we're told the next Mac Pro won't even have upgradeable RAM, and based on what I've seen so far, I'm not very optimistic about the prospect of drivers for PCI cards not specifically designed for Mac.

I've now realized that the advantages of Apple Silicon we were promised were just hype. This was always just about Apple making more profit.

It was never about the customer getting the best value for their money. Most of the problems with Intel chips were due to their being stuck on 10nm process combined with Apple's insistence on making laptops without adequate cooling for the thermal profile of the chip. This could have been addressed without changing to Arm64 architecture CPUs, such as by going with AMD chips made by TSMC. Yes, AMD has this month announced a laptop CPU that is 50% more efficient than the M2.

So here's the thing.

I already bought a top-spec M1 MacBook Pro, but I'm pretty unhappy with the trajectory of this new platform so far. For me to feel OK going through this yet again. I still have my scars from the 68000-to-PowerPC transition, the PowerPC-to-Intel transition, the OS 9 to OS X transition, the end of Classic support, the end of Rosetta support, the end of 32-bit support, the move to a locked down system, etc.

But for me to not sell it, and want to stick with Apple Silicon, here's what I would ideally like Apple to do:

1. Allow hardware upgrades for all Apple Silicon Macs where Apple lets you trade it in for a very competitive price and lets you stay current, as compensation for the fact we have seen much slower release of new software than people were probably expecting.
2. Guarantee Mac users that no macOS or CPU upgrades will break their current software or hardware drivers for at least the next 15 years.
3. Release a truly modular, open hardware platform including a spec for motherboards allowing third-parties to make motherboards, GPUs, cases, etc. to keep the Mac platform truly competitive with the PC realm. People will still pay for Apple-made systems I'm sure, but I really think Apple can afford to make the Hackintosh market official rather than killing it, and if it doesn't do so, then it seems very unlikely to me that the gamers who drive most consumer PC sales will ever view Mac as a relevant platform. Given Apple's OS and CPU architecture are so much more optimally engineered than Windows, I would think that anyone in their right mind would gladly pay for a macOS license and build a gaming Mac if that was supported and they felt it would give them better frames per second and responsiveness. But Apple seems to think that it can just throw a new Metal version at game developers and that's all they need to start bringing all the AAA games to Mac. Wrong.

I doubt any of these things will happen and, y'know, what do I know? I'm just a life-long customer who hates having to also buy a PC for gaming because Apple is stuck staring at its navel.

 

[Curry119]

I think you are correct that the transition to Apple silicon was more about profit than performance. The performance race changes every month, but the support for adding RAM, HDD, and PCI is probably behind us. I mainly looks to Apple for the portable/non-upgradable machines for this reason. You would probably be better off with a PC for your desktop needs.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Allow hardware upgrades for all Apple Silicon Macs where Apple lets you trade it in for a very competitive price and lets you stay current, as compensation for the fact we have seen much slower release of new software than people were probably expecting.

I would love to see this.

Guarantee Mac users that no macOS or CPU upgrades will break their current software or hardware drivers for at least the next 15 years.

Pass me whatever you’re smoking, that must be some good !@#$…

Release a truly modular, open hardware platform including a spec for motherboards allowing third-parties to make motherboards, GPUs, cases, etc. to keep the Mac platform truly competitive with the PC realm.

They did try this, at one point. I worked for Radio Shack back when we sold a “Macintosh Compatible” computer. I’m not convinced that the juice is worth the squeeze on that one… but willing to listen.

 

[cthompson94]

Allow hardware upgrades for all Apple Silicon Macs where Apple lets you trade it in for a very competitive price and lets you stay current, as compensation for the fact we have seen much slower release of new software than people were probably expecting.

I can see this happening just a little. Most trade in programs are trash and you will also get the best bang for your buck through the 2nd hand market. The most recent release of the M2 and people seeing the M1 trade in price drop so much has sparked a little outrage and I guess we need to see if it is enough to get the value adjusted a little.

Guarantee Mac users that no macOS or CPU upgrades will break their current software or hardware drivers for at least the next 15 years.

Yeah...you cannot get this Guarantee anywhere sorry..You will never get new software releases that don't break something somewhere. If you want this I guess you would need to go Linux and install things how you see fit, but then you have other hurdles and good luck in Windows land with this because well just look up how Windows 11 is doing

Release a truly modular, open hardware platform including a spec for motherboards allowing third-parties to make motherboards, GPUs, cases, etc. to keep the Mac platform truly competitive with the PC realm. People will still pay for Apple-made systems I'm sure, but I really think Apple can afford to make the Hackintosh market official rather than killing it, and if it doesn't do so, then it seems very unlikely to me that the gamers who drive most consumer PC sales will ever view Mac as a relevant platform. Given Apple's OS and CPU architecture are so much more optimally engineered than Windows, I would think that anyone in their right mind would gladly pay for a macOS license and build a gaming Mac if that was supported and they felt it would give them better frames per second and responsiveness. But Apple seems to think that it can just throw a new Metal version at game developers and that's all they need to start bringing all the AAA games to Mac. Wrong.

Companies big and small have tried and tried again for module designs and they just keep failing. You need to remember that part of the reason Mac is better optimized is because (and you won't like this) of soldered on components. Granted, this isn't a big thing and the problem more for PC is you have so many things from other companies that release drivers when they want and then you have Windows Drivers and they sometimes don't work well together. Basically for this to happen Apple would need to be the creators of everything and they are not, if in theory you want the efficiency and optimization of Mac but in a "PC Version" Apple would need to make everything a separate GPU, CPU, Motherboard, RAM, and took keep up with your modular design they would need to make all of these modular and not just soldered on.

The closest thing I think you may have to this is the rumored and possibly upcoming Mac Pro, but I am very skeptical on what Apple will do to that

 

[redheeler]

Guarantee Mac users that no macOS or CPU upgrades will break their current software or hardware drivers for at least the next 15 years.

Those of us who work in software know that a guarantee like this is basically impossible. Something is always going to break as long as there are updates to the hardware or software.

 

[redheeler]

Release a truly modular, open hardware platform including a spec for motherboards allowing third-parties to make motherboards, GPUs, cases, etc. to keep the Mac platform truly competitive with the PC realm. People will still pay for Apple-made systems I'm sure, but I really think Apple can afford to make the Hackintosh market official rather than killing it, and if it doesn't do so, then it seems very unlikely to me that the gamers who drive most consumer PC sales will ever view Mac as a relevant platform. Given Apple's OS and CPU architecture are so much more optimally engineered than Windows, I would think that anyone in their right mind would gladly pay for a macOS license and build a gaming Mac if that was supported and they felt it would give them better frames per second and responsiveness. But Apple seems to think that it can just throw a new Metal version at game developers and that's all they need to start bringing all the AAA games to Mac. Wrong.

Anyone asking for a "gaming Mac" should build a Windows PC and stop complaining. Macs aren't and never were intended for gaming. They also aren't an open platform. If you want an open platform then build your gaming PC and put Linux on it, you can find some very sleek Mac-like distributions out there. It's clear that Apple isn't interested in entering this space.

 

[vinegarshots]

Rule 1 of buying Apple hardware is to only buy on its capabilities NOW and not some pie-in-the-sky set of potential future capabilities that Apple promises. By the time Apple delivers on its future capabilities, they're probably obsolete and replaced with something else.

I learned this when I bought an iMac Pro back in 2018, and assumed that I would actually be able to use it in my workflow because of promises Apple was making about Metal integration into software that still hasn't fully matured 5 years later.

 

[crsh1976]

Anyone asking for a "gaming Mac" should build a Windows PC and stop complaining. Macs aren't and never were intended for gaming. They also aren't an open platform. If you want an open platform then build your gaming PC and put Linux on it, you can find some very sleek Mac-like distributions out there. It's clear that Apple isn't interested in entering this space.

Well that's not entirely true, at least during the Intel years we could rely on Bootcamp rather than a secondary gaming-specific rig if casual gaming is all one was after.

We lost x86 compatibility with the move to ARM, we have pretty powerful processors and GPUs that are not used for gaming (save for a handful of titles that are a lot more about demoing that gaming on Apple silicon is possible). We gloat that benchmarks say Apple silicon GPU cores are super fast, but we have not much real-world games to go with all processing power.

Apple did a long stretch by not acknowledging gaming due to not being able to rival gaming PC prices, and instead of ensuring their ARM platform could be an opportunity for game developers, they elected to focus on their closed ecosystem of iOS games that now be played on Macs.

I'm not about to kick & scream about how unfair this is, I get Apple's strategy because it is indeed driven by high profit margins rather than customer needs, the move to ARM is mostly successful inspite of handing us all-soldered, unupgradeable computers - the performance and seamless integration are supposed to make up for that. But second to gamers, professionals are clearly not a priority - no upgrades, no customization, no platform program to drive adoption for 3rd party manufacturers (who are put off given how they literally cannot fit in Macs in any way anymore).

The formula is the same as for consumers: take it as is and shut up, or go shop elsewhere. It works for Apple, so I suppose this is all that matters.