Leaving Apple After 14 Years
I’ve been a Mac user for just over 14 years now, having received my first Mac, a battered Pwerbook G4 from my dad as a present for getting into University.
Since then I’ve had a number of Macs:
- One of the white plastic iMacs from when Apple first moved to Intel chips
- A beast of a 2009 Mac Pro that I bought with my University maintenance loan
- A black Macbook, which I got upgraded to the newer model for free as I bought it 3 days before the new model was released
- A retina 13" Macbook Pro when they first came out
- A touchbar 13" Macbook Pro when they first came out
Over the years I’ve easily given Apple close to £10,000 but it’s only recently I’ve felt I wouldn’t be getting my return in investment.
What changed
My computing needs are probably a bit different than your average user, I build mobile apps, I used to do 3D animations (which was what the Mac Pro was bought for) and I’ve recently started with Machine Learning.
Taking up Machine Learning was actually the turning point for me. My Macbook Pro constantly has only about 30GB left on it’s disk (not ideal when having to consume a 200GB Corpus) and there’s no way it could handle the type of workload needed to train the model.
I’m also keen to avoid using the cloud for training models, I’m learning how to do Machine Learning so I need an environment that I can run without having to worry about a £100 AWS bill turning up every month.
An additional driver was the fact that all non-computational apps that I used on my Mac were basically just web apps wrapped in a .app container so I was less locked in than I would have been in the past.
A processing expensive hobby
With Machine Learning in mind I started looking for a machine that would deliver on both the power and storage needs I have and Apple came up short.
When I bought my 2009 Mac Pro it was £1900 (although I got a student discount at £1600) on the machine which had an 8-core Xeon, 6GB of RAM and 512MB graphics card, it was expandable and looked absolutely stunning.
The most affordable equivalent Mac I guess would be the 21" iMac with the 6-core option, which would set you back £1649 (£1949 for a 256GB SSD and 16GB RAM upgrade) and is no way as expandable as the Mac Pro was.
The iMac Pro and Mac Pro are laughably un-affordable to anyone who isn’t going to be claiming it as a business expense so I had to look elsewhere and settled on a 8-core, 32GB of RAM and 5GB graphics card box from Dell for around £1600.
This was my first non-Apple PC in 14 years and my first Windows machine in 18 years (I used to run Ubuntu on a poorly constructed heap of components in my teens).
Welcome to Windows
I’ve seen Windows 10 used at work and it looked radically different than what I’d used previously so I was actually looking forward to seeing how well Microsoft had turned around their UX.
Once I’d got my basic apps set up I was quite happy with Windows. It was refreshing and as someone who uses a 4K monitor I really appreciated the scaling that the UI does.
A friend of mine even sweetened the pot by pointing me in the direction of Windows Subsystem Linux 2, a means of running Ubuntu almost natively on Windows 10, giving you access to a proper shell from within Windows.
I even started to explore PC gaming again, something I’d never do on my Macbook Pro as I can’t justify the disk space and the integrated graphics just won’t cut it.
The new machine was running reasonably well, and the migration was looking promising.
Ah, here it is… The Fuckening
It first started with the green screens of death on logging into Windows, a sad face would tell me that there was a HYPERVISOR_ERROR and while a fresh reboot fixed the issues they would popup at the worst times.
This was then followed by some of the build tools I was using for a React Native app, failing due to there being a space in my home folder name, something which I don’t recall having much control over on setting the machine up.
In an attempt to remedy this problem with the folder I ended up getting into a situation where the change of the home folder name meant that certain apps couldn’t load, even though I extensively searched the registry all over for references to update.
So I decided, as I had only had the machine for a couple of days I could do a reset, make sure my user folder name is correct and then start fresh.
Nope, after the reset cleared all the files it refused to boot past the initial setup screen, even downloading a new copy of Windows 10 didn’t remedy the issue.
I think it was about 2AM, after 3 hours of trying to resuscitate the machine, that I reached for the Linux defibrillator and installed Ubuntu on it.
Back to Life, back to (using) Unity
I’m not a massive Ubuntu fan, having fallen in love with Crunchbang when it was still active and I’ve been chasing that OpenBox, tint2 and dmenu high ever since.
But Ubuntu works well with Dells and as every distro I seem to like (R.I.P Antergos) ceases development I’ll have to stick with it for the time being.
Of course it being a Linux distro, I’ve had to learn the special combination of settings to stabilise the machine but after disabling secure boot it’s a completely different machine than when it was running under Windows.
Gnome is also in a better state then when I last used it, with some really awesome themes available now that I’d say give Mac OSX a run for it’s money in the looks department.
My Steam games all seem to run under Linux which is another positive, although I am now locked out of certain games like TemTem, a Pokemon like game that I really wanted to check out.
One thing that’s missing from Ubuntu is of course the iOS development tools that I need to build apps with, but as I mostly use React Native these days I can just rely on using a Mac OSX CI box for anything requiring that.
Additionally with Expo Client I can run the app on my iPhone easily enough.
So is a Dell better than a Mac?
Running Ubuntu yes, it offers all the unix awesomeness of a Mac, my setup looks better than my Mac and I have access to a lot more power than I could ever get from a Mac for the same price.
There is one thing that I will praise Apple for though, their machines just work.
The Dell when it was running Windows was an absolute pain the in arse to deal with and if I was an ‘every day user’ who switched from a Mac to Dell to save money I would have returned the machine and went running back into Apples over-expensive arms.
